Posters Galore: Securing Software Defined Networks Through Blockchain Technology

Dr Jiejun Hu
University of Essex

The Internet of Things (IoT) is coming fast upon us. With its arrival, industry, homes, and society will potentially suffer from increased security risks through the large volume of connected IoT devices. This could overturn the huge benefits of this forthcoming cyber-physical reality.

SerIoT is a project funded by the EUs Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme (grant No 780139) that addresses the information security in IoT platforms and networks.

It works in a holistic, cross-layered manner i.e. through solutions in IoT platforms & devices, honeypots, software defined networking (SDN). Within SerIoT, this work proposes a blockchain-based SDN framework to provide a novel solution of the potential security issues in SDN.

Specifically, we propose a blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) framework to support:

1. switch flow verification and insertion
2. secure communication between a SDN switch and controller
3. protection of the connection privacy among the IoT devices
4. fast deployment of blockchain for SerIoT.

Use of an external BaaS may lead to lack of knowledge of the blockchain agents who are responsible for new flow verification/validation by running a smart contract.

 

We need to design a strategy to prevent the blockchain agents from acting arbitrarily, as this would result in what is termed a Moral hazard. Thus, this work develops a novel mathematical model of the fair reward scheme through game theory. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm balances the needs of the blockchain agents to maximise the overall social welfare, i.e. the sum of profit across all parties.

 

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