Software defined networking (SDN) appliances the network control plane in an external entity rather than in each individual device as in the conventional networks(CN).

Control plane security deals with the logic of controller and aimed at processing the Packet_In requests that prevents malicious users to make an effectual DoS attack on the controller by bring out a large amount of unique flow requests. The SDN control plane can be implemented by using following three models:

 •  Physically centralized
 •  Physically distributed
 •  Hybrid

Control Plane security is a shield form of communication among a controller and APs to protect the control plane communications. The main functions of the control plane which includes ,

 •  Routing
 •  Security
 •  Load balancing
 •  Analysis

By increasing the control plane security an user ensures a superior quality of service (QoS) for legitimate by interchanging an approach to the flow processing prioritized.

Here , the control plane is a latest system that elongate a top-level domains (TLD) operator traditional services and detects potential threats in the TLD by continuously analyzing the operators. Security applications can collect all the samples of packets through control plane. After completing security analysis, the security systems can redirect the entire traffic according to higher level security policy via the control plane using South-bound API.

The control plane gets highly more attractive to security attacks and to DoS and DDoS attacks because of its visibility in nature. SDN security research has chased to leverage the visibility and programmability which is provided by SDN in order to increase the security against traditional attacks .

An OpenFlow is the most prominent SDN formation, there is a great interest in mitigating security problems in protocol as it is used in large production settings. The control plain (Openflow controller) is a centralized decision-making entity highly targeted for compromising the network or carrying out malicious activity due to its pivotal role. The main security threats and challenges existing in the control plane security which includes,

 •  Threats from Applications
 •  Threats due to Scalability
 •  DoS Attacks
 •  DDos Attacks