Network Attack Detection and Defense (Dagstuhl Seminar 16361)

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 16361 "Network Attack Detection and Defense: Security Challenges and Opportunities of Software-Defined Networking". Software-defined networking (SDN) has attracted a great attention both in industry and academia since the beginning of the decade. This attention keeps undiminished. Security-related aspects of software-defined networking have only been considered more recently. Opinions differ widely. The main objective of the seminar was to discuss the various contrary facets of SDN security. The seminar continued the series of Dagstuhl events Network Attack Detection and Defense held in 2008, 2012, and 2014. The objectives of the seminar were threefold, namely (1) to discuss the security challenges of SDN, (2) to debate strategies to monitor and protect SDN-enabled networks, and (3) to propose methods and strategies to leverage on the flexibility brought by SDN for designing new security mechanisms. At the seminar, which brought together participants from academia and industry, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using software-defined networks from the security point of view. We agreed that SDN provides new possibilities to better secure networks, but also offers a number of serious security problems which require further research. The outcome of these discussions and the proposed research directions are presented in this report.