Software defined networking (SDN) has attracted significant attention from both academia and industry by its ability to reconfigure network devices with logically centralized applications. However, some critical security issues have also been introduced along with the benefits, which put an obstruction to the deployment of SDN. One root cause of these issues lies in the limited resources and capability of devices involved in the SDN architecture, especially the hardware switches lied in the data plane. In this paper, we analyze the vulnerability of SDN and present two kinds of SDN-targeted attacks: 1) data-to-control plane saturation attack which exhausts resources of all SDN components, including control plane, data plane, and the in-between downlink channel and 2) control plane reflection attack which only attacks the data plane and gets conducted in a more efficient and hidden way. Finally, we propose the corresponding defense frameworks to mitigate such attacks.

Software defined networking (SDN) has been applied increasingly in practical networks. Currently, SDN is mainly used to improve the flexibility and efficiency of datacenter networks, enterprise networks and wide-area networks (WAN). There also emerge some studies that try to deploy SDN to inter-domain settings. In this article, we introduce the progress stages of inter-domain SDN and studies related to each stage. Finally, we discuss the applications and challenges of inter-domain SDN.

The end-to-end attribute of the Internet enables easy modification and deployment of applications running at the host. Competition among these applications promotes the development of the Internet. However, new protocols related to the core layer, and network routers and switches are often hard to successfully implement. This paper proposes an Evolvable Internet Architecture (EIA). It suggests that new network architectures can be plugged into network equipment or into a host through interfaces provided by EIA for network experimentation or actual network deployment. Users can independently select network architectures, and use one or some of these architectures at the same time. The diversity provided by EIA will promote the evolution of the Internet.

The ongoing research on secure and trustworthy issues in next generation Internet technology is still insufficient. China has achieved some progress in the field of the trusted next generation Internet. Under the support of the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program), Tsinghua University and other units have completed the program named Research on Critical Technologies and Demonstration Applications of the Trusted Next Generation Internet , which targets the secure and trustworthy problems existing in the current Internet. With focus on tackling the technical problem of authentic address access in the Internet, a prototype system for trusted Internet infrastructure , security service and typical applications are designed and implemented . It is expected that the trusted next generation Internet will support the trusted computer network, trusted telecom network and trusted broadcast & TV network applications .