Abstract
Emerging 5G/6G communication and next-generation Internet (NGI) technologies demand proper administration and control of an ultra large-scale dynamic network to provide high-speed ubiquitous networked-resource accessing while assisting higher channel bandwidth. The conventional static network infrastructure-based solutions provide only manual supervision and third-party provisioning of the networked assets. In addition, such settings mostly forefront to unsuitable resource usage, and sometimes lead to several security and privacy concerns. The de facto Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has come up with several new promises to solve such limitations. Since its inception, SDN decouples the traditional data layer from the control plane of a third-party network equipment, which is claimed to be ensured higher security, dynamicity, scalability, efficiency, and faster reconfiguration capability of a ultra large-scale dynamic network as compared with the conventional network. However, a thorough inspection of the literature presently shows that most of the vulnerabilities are originated from the two specific layers, namely, control and data plane of the underlying SDN framework. Also, due to the absence of proper authentication and access control mechanisms ensuring inevitable protection of the SDN controller node and the network assets is a very challenging task. Though secure socket layer (SSL) or transport layer security (TLS)-based solutions are predominantly advocated in this domain to assist security in SDN framework but such mechanisms are also vulnerable to spoofing, sniffing, eavesdropping, replay, man-in-the-middle, privileged-insider, denial-of-service, distributed-denial-of-service, impersonation attacks. Therefore, this work qualitatively countermeasures all the recently attended (or unattended) state-of-the-art security and privacy concerns related to the recently reported access control, authentication, key management, secure data aggregation, privacy-aware secure auditing, and layer-wise functional inconvenience policies with respect to each and every layers of SDN platform. This study hence will be helpful to the academicians and researchers for the future development of new policies and protocols in the SDN platform.