SDSecurity: A Software Defined Security Experimental Framework

The emerging Software Defined Systems (SDSys) is a recent paradigm, which has been introduced to reduce the overhead in the control and management operations of complex computing systems. The main concept behind this technology is around isolating the data plane from the control plane. Traditional security mechanisms are facing more challenges in providing sufficient levels of protection and efficiency. SDSys for security has been proposed to address these challenges. Software Defined Security (SDSec) provides a flexible and centralized security solution by abstracting the security mechanisms from the hardware layer to a software layer. In this paper we present a novel experimental framework to provide a novel virtualized testbed environment for SDSec systems. This work builds on the Mininet simulator, where its core components, the host, switch and the controller, are customized to build the proposed experimental simulation framework for SDSec. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first experimental framework and simulator for SDSec solutions. The developed simulator, will not only support the development and testing of SDSecurity solutions, it will also serve as an experimentation tool for researchers and for benchmarking purposes. The developed simulator could also be used as an educational tool to train students and novice researchers.