SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences, Volume 62 , Issue 3 : 032106(2019) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-017-9439-7

## CATH: an effective method for detecting denial-of-service attacks in software defined networks

• AcceptedMar 30, 2018
• PublishedFeb 12, 2019
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### Acknowledgment

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61402525, 61402526, 61502528), Key Scientific Research Projects of Henan Province Education Department (Grant No. 18A520004), and Henan Province Science and Technology Projects (Grant No. 182102310925). We also thank Zhong HUA for interesting and helpful discussion on the ideas presented here.

### References

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• Figure 1

(Color online) Workflow of CATH.

• Figure 2

(Color online) SDN-DoS attacks based on (a) forged source IP and (b) port transformation.

• Figure 3

Catastrophe between normal/abnormal equilibrium state.

• Figure 4

(Color online) CDF of the flow table matching rate in a DoS attack.

• Figure 5

Geometry of the cusp catastrophe model.

• Figure 6

(Color online) Criteria for determining network states.

• Figure 7

(Color online) Topology of (a) the SOHO network and (b) the larger scale enterprise network.

• Figure 8

(Color online) ANPF of normal and attack traffic.

• Figure 11

(Color online) ROC curve for the simple network.

• Figure 12

(Color online) ANPF of detected traffic when $t~$= 0.5 s.

• Figure 15

(Color online) ROC curves of CATH and GHOSM.

• Table 1   Typical SDN-related DoS attack detection mechanisms
 Corresponding scenario DoS detection method Basic principle DoS detection in SDN AvantGuard [8] Using SYN proxy based module to verify the legality of each flow. FloodGuard [9] Utilizing the real-time rate of PACKET_IN messages and the infrastructure (controller memory and CPU) to identify potential flooding attacks. Entropy-based methods[10,11] Identifying attacks by comparing the values of selected flow features with their preset values. SOM-based methods[12,13] Using the self-organizing map machine learning technique for detecting SDN-aimed DoS attacks. SDN for DoS detection Fresco [14,15] Using the OpenFlow technology as a flow regulation tool to monitor traffic. VAVE [16] Utilizing the SDN architecture to validate source addresses. Bohatei [17] Using the flexibility of SDN to steer suspicious traffic through the defense VMs while minimizing user-perceived latency and network congestion.
• Table 2   Detection results at different attack rates
 Attack-rate (p/s) TP or FP Detection result (%) $t=0.1$ s $t=0.2$ s $t=0.3$ s $t=0.4$ s $t=0.5$ s 12000 TP 91.4 92.1 92.8 93.5 93.9 FP 4.89 4.87 4.73 4.23 3.97 13000 TP 91.6 92.4 93.5 94.1 94.7 FP 5.02 4.13 4.21 4.78 4.80 15000 TP 93.7 94.2 94.9 95.1 96.2 FP 3.76 3.51 3.41 3.64 2.97

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