Towards robust trust in software defined networks

Software defined networks (SDNs) are becoming more popular in industry, though currently still only deployed by technically-savvy organizations. Nevertheless, as the advantages of using SDN become clear, future adoption promises to be high, with all network equipment vendors quickly moving to deploy products providing SDN capabilities. This impending wider adoption demands that security implications within SDN be more clearly understood. Today, mechanisms through which vendors can provide enhanced integrity and availability as well as authentication and non-repudiation are poorly understood and have yet to be thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we present our current work outlining how we can define trust in SDN and what trust in SDN means for various operational components, addressing the operational characteristics that impact trust propagation.