SDN research: An OpenFlow cloud security plan is hatched

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Michelle McNickle.

As the use of cloud computing grows, so do the threats that endanger a cloud environment. Seungwon Shin, Ph.D., assistant professor at the graduate school of information security at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, recently developed a framework that uses OpenFlow to implement more granular security monitoring for cloud service providers.

Shin detailed the creation and implementation of this framework in his research paper, CloudWatcher: Network Security Monitoring Using OpenFlow in Dynamic Cloud Networks, which he completed as a PhD student at Texas A&M University. We asked Shin to expand on the challenges network administrators are facing today with regard cloud security, and how CloudWatcher uses OpenFlow to enable security in multi-tenant cloud environments…

What are some of the challenges of monitoring and securing cloud networks?

Seungwon Shin: There are several issues in monitoring cloud networks for security — the most critical, I think, is the complexity of network configurations. There are many hosts and VMs [virtual machines] in a cloud network, and they are connected to each other to provide network services. It requires many network connection links, and all these links can be the points for monitoring…

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