Software-Defined Network (SDN) has been developed to reduce network complexity through control and manage the whole network from a centralized location. Today, SDN is widely implemented in many data center’s network environments. Nevertheless, emerging technology itself can lead to many vulnerabilities and threats which are still challenging for manufacturers to address it. Therefore, deploying Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) to monitor malicious activities is a crucial part of the network architecture. Although the centralized view of the SDN network creates new opportunities for the implementation of IDSs, the performance of these detection techniques relies on the quality of the training datasets. Unfortunately, there are no publicly available datasets that can be used directly for anomaly detection systems applied in SDN networks. The majority of the published studies use non-compatible and outdated datasets, such as the KDD’99 dataset. This manuscript aims to generate an attack-specific SDN dataset and it is publicly available to the researchers. To the best of our knowledge, our work is one of the first solutions to produce a comprehensive SDN dataset to verify the performance of intrusion detection systems. The new dataset includes the benign and various attack categories that can occur in the different elements of the SDN platform. Further, we demonstrate the use of our proposed dataset by performing an experimental evaluation using eight popular machine-learning-based techniques for IDSs.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has introduced the paradigm of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) to enable efficient and fast data processing in mobile networks. Among other technological requirements, security and privacy are significant factors in the realization of MEC deployments. In this paper, we analyse the security and privacy of the MEC system. We introduce a thorough investigation of the identification and the analysis of threat vectors in the ETSI standardized MEC architecture. Furthermore, we analyse the vulnerabilities leading to the identified threat vectors and propose potential security solutions to overcome these vulnerabilities. The privacy issues of MEC are also highlighted, and clear objectives for preserving privacy are defined. Finally, we present future directives to enhance the security and privacy of MEC services.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network platform, which facilitates centralised network management. The SDN enables the network operators to manage the overall network consistently and holistically, regardless the complexity of infrastructure devices. The promising features of the SDN enhance network security and facilitate the implementation of threat detection systems through software applications using open APIs. However, the emerging technology creates new security concerns and new threats that do not exist in the current traditional networks. Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) are one of the most rampant attacks that can interrupt the functionality of the network and make most of the network services unreachable for network users. The efficient identification of DDos attacks on SDN environments in literature is still a challenge because of the number of network features taken into account and the overhead of applying machine learning based anomaly detection techniques. Hence, in this paper, we aim to use two popular feature selection methods i.e. Information Gain (IG) and Random Forest (RF) in order to analyse the most comprehensive relevant features of DDoS attacks in SDN networks. Using the most relevant features will improve the accuracy of the anomaly detection system and reduce the false alarm rates. Moreover, we propose a Deep Learning (DL) technique based on Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Autoencoder to tackle the problem of DDoS attacks in SDNs. We perform our analysis and evaluation on three different datasets i.e. InSDN, CICIDS2017 and CICIDS2018. We also measure the overhead of the proposed DL model on the SDN controller and test the network performance in terms of network throughput and end-to-end latency. The results validate that the DL approach can efficiently identify DDoS attacks in SDN environments without any significant degradation in the controller performance.

The explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications has imposed a dramatic increase of network data and placed a high computation complexity across various connected devices. The IoT devices capture valuable information, which allows the industries or individual users to make critical live dependent decisions. Most of these IoT devices have resource constraints such as low CPU, limited memory, and low energy storage. Hence, these devices are vulnerable to cyber-attacks due to the lack of capacity to run existing general-purpose security software. It creates an inherent risk in IoT networks. The multi-access edge computing (MEC) platform has emerged to mitigate these constraints by relocating complex computing tasks from the IoT devices to the edge. Most of the existing related works are focusing on finding the optimized security solutions to protect the IoT devices. We believe distributed solutions leveraging MEC should draw more attention. This paper presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) and security practices for IoT networks. We have analyzed the approaches based on MEC platforms and utilizing machine learning (ML) techniques. The paper also performs a comparative analysis on the public available datasets, evaluation metrics, and deployment strategies employed in the NIDS design. Finally, we propose an NIDS framework for IoT networks leveraging MEC.