Security Dynamics of Blockchain-Enabled SDN Systems: A Taxonomic Approach

In the current landscape, security challenges extend to various domains, such as IoT networking, UAV communication, and VANETs, rendering underlying infrastructures increasingly susceptible to cyber-attacks. The taxonomies, targets, and purposes of these attacks are closely linked to the properties of the underlying infrastructures. With the elevated vulnerability risks and attacks targeting specific elements of Software Defined Networking (SDN), integrating blockchain technology into networking has emerged as a potential solution. However, this convergence of SDN and blockchain introduces new security risks. This position paper overviews blockchain-enhanced SDN systems focusing on security issues and reviews existing research and arguments. Notably, there is currently no agreed-upon established taxonomy for the integrated security of SDN and blockchain. As a contribution to the literature, this paper proposes a taxonomy for classifying security approaches within SDN and blockchain deployment scenarios. This taxonomy categorizes solutions based on defense mechanisms, defense planes, blockchain deployment types, and SDN deployment types. Additionally, we discuss the open issues and challenges at the intersection of SDN and blockchain technologies from a security perspective.