Assignment: Security Challenges in Emerging Networks
Purpose
The purpose of this assignment is to develop research and analytical skills. In this assignment students will first learn how to develop knowledge on current state of the art of an emerging knowledge domain. Students will then critically analyse three current or future security issues in this area and its countermeasures. Students should be able to demonstrate their achievements in the following unit learning outcomes:
Explain the major methodologies for secure networks and what threats they address;
Identify and report network threats, select and implement appropriate countermeasures for network security;
Length: 1500 - 2000 words.
Description
The purpose of this assignment is to develop research and analytical skills. In this assignment students will first learn how to develop knowledge based on current state of the art of an emerging knowledge domain. They will critically analyse three current or future security issues in this area and its countermeasures.
Software defined networking (SDN) is an emerging area in computer networking, where the networking functionalities are decoupled from the actual hardware. SDN architecture consists of three layers named the application, the control layer and the data forwarding layer. SDN has advantages over the traditional network in terms of simplicity, programmability and elasticity and has drawn huge interest from industry and academia. How to make SDN more secure still needs to be investigated. In this assignment student will work on the security issues in SDN.
This assignment includes three parts.
1. Literature review on security aspects in Software Defined Networking (SDN):
Your review should be supported by at least three academic (journal/conference) papers chosen from the current state of the art. The paper should not be older than three years.
Your discussion should include:
i. Introduction to SDN (mentioning its layers: data forwarding layer, control layer and application layer)
ii. Characteristics of SDN compared to the traditional network
iii. A comparison of advantages and disadvantages of SDN over traditional networks regarding security issues.
2. Analyse critically, three current or future security issues in SDN and its countermeasures.
In this section you will
i. Explain and analyse critically three security issues in SDN.
ii. Explain the countermeasures/mitigation techniques and tools used for each one of the security issues mentioned in section i.
This section must be supported by at least three references (good quality conference or journal paper such as IEEE/ACM/Springer).
3. Create a 3 - 5 minutes presentation and present your work during the Laboratory class.
You have to create a 3 - 5 minutes presentation to present your work in front of your class members and tutor during the Laboratory class.