A systematic review on distributed denial of service attack defense mechanisms in programmable networks

Design flaws and vulnerabilities inherent to network protocols, devices, and services make Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) a persisting threat in the cyberspace, despite decades of research efforts in the area. The historical vertical integration of traditional IP networks limited the solution space, forcing researchers to tweak network protocols while maintaining global compatibility and proper service to legitimate flows. The advent of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and advances in Programmable Data Planes (PDP) changed the state of affairs and brought novel possibilities to deal with such attacks. In summary, the ability of bringing together network intelligence to a control plane, and offloading flow processing tasks to the forwarding plane, opened up interesting opportunities for network security researchers unlike ever. In this article, we dive into recent research that relies on SDN and PDP to detect, mitigate, and prevent DDoS attacks. Our literature review takes into account the SDN layered view as defined in RFC7426 and focuses on the data, control, and application planes. We follow a systematic methodology to capture related articles and organize them into a taxonomy of DDoS defense mechanisms focusing on three facets: activity level, deployment location, and cooperation degree. From the analysis of existing work, we also highlight key research gaps that may foster future research in the field.