As novel technologies continue to reshape the digital era, cyberattacks are also increasingly becoming more commonplace and sophisticated. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are, perhaps, the most prevalent and exponentially-growing attack, targeting the varied and emerging computational network infrastructures across the globe. This necessitates the design of an efficient and early detection of large-scale sophisticated DDoS attacks. Software defined networks (SDN) point to a promising solution, as a network paradigm which decouples the centralized control intelligence from the forwarding logic. In this work, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) ensemble framework for efficient DDoS attack detection in SDNs is proposed. The proposed framework is evaluated on a current state-of-the-art Flowbased dataset under established benchmarks. Improved accuracy is demonstrated against existing related detection approaches.

The emergence of SDNs promises to dramatically simplify network management and enable innovation through network programmability. Despite all the hype surrounding SDNs, exploiting its full potential is demanding. Security is still the key concern and is an equally striking challenge that reduces the growth of SDNs. Moreover, the deployment of novel entities and the introduction of several architectural components of SDNs pose new security threats and vulnerabilities. Besides, the landscape of digital threats and cyber-attacks is evolving tremendously, considering SDNs as a potential target to have even more devastating effects than using simple networks. Security is not considered as part of the initial SDN design; therefore, it must be raised on the agenda. This article discusses the state-of-the-art security solutions proposed to secure SDNs. We classify the security solutions in the literature by presenting a thematic taxonomy based on SDN layers/interfaces, security measures, simulation environments, and security objectives. Moreover, the article points out the possible attacks and threat vectors targeting different layers/interfaces of SDNs. The potential requirements and their key enablers for securing SDNs are also identified and presented. Also, the article gives great guidance for secure and dependable SDNs. Finally, we discuss open issues and challenges of SDN security that may be deemed appropriate to be tackled by researchers and professionals in the future.

The emerging expanding scope of the Internet of Things (IoT) necessitates robust intrusion detection systems (IDS) to mitigate security risks effectively. However, existing approaches often struggle with adaptability to emerging threats and fail to account for IoT-specific complexities. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel approach by hybridizing convolutional neural network (CNN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) architectures tailored for IoT intrusion detection. This hybrid model excels in capturing intricate features and learning relational aspects crucial in IoT security. Moreover, we integrate the feature-weighted synthetic minority oversampling technique (FW-SMOTE) to handle imbalanced datasets, which commonly afflict intrusion detection tasks. Validation using the IoTID20 dataset, designed to emulate IoT environments, yields exceptional results with 99.60% accuracy in attack detection, surpassing existing benchmarks. Additionally, evaluation on the network domain dataset, UNSW-NB15, demonstrates robust performance with 99.16% accuracy, highlighting the model’s applicability across diverse datasets. This innovative approach not only addresses current limitations in IoT intrusion detection but also establishes new benchmarks in terms of accuracy and adaptability. The findings underscore its potential as a versatile and effective solution for safeguarding IoT ecosystems against evolving security threats.

Cloud computing has emerged as a long-dreamt vision of the utility computing paradigm that provides reliable and resilient infrastructure for users to remotely store data and use on-demand applications and services. Currently, many individuals and organizations mitigate the burden of local data storage and reduce the maintenance cost by outsourcing data to the cloud. However, the outsourced data is not always trustworthy due to the loss of physical control and possession over the data. As a result, many scholars have concentrated on relieving the security threats of the outsourced data by designing the Remote Data Auditing (RDA) technique as a new concept to enable public auditability for the stored data in the cloud. The RDA is a useful technique to check the reliability and integrity of data outsourced to a single or distributed servers. This is because all of the RDA techniques for single cloud servers are unable to support data recovery; such techniques are complemented with redundant storage mechanisms. The article also reviews techniques of remote data auditing more comprehensively in the domain of the distributed clouds in conjunction with the presentation of classifying ongoing developments within this specified area. The thematic taxonomy of the distributed storage auditing is presented based on significant parameters, such as scheme nature, security pattern, objective functions, auditing mode, update mode, cryptography model, and dynamic data structure. The more recent remote auditing approaches, which have not gained considerable attention in distributed cloud environments, are also critically analyzed and further categorized into three different classes, namely, replication based, erasure coding based, and network coding based, to present a taxonomy. This survey also aims to investigate similarities and differences of such a framework on the basis of the thematic taxonomy to diagnose significant and explore major outstanding issues.