An SDN approach to detect targeted attacks in P2P fully connected overlays

Pollution attacks are one of the major concerns facing P2P networks. They have a tremendous impact on push-based fully connected overlays, in which each peer receives an exclusive chunk from the source and is also the only one responsible for relaying it to the rest of the peers. In this study, we propose a novel technique to identify and expel malicious peers which involves using trusted peers, software-defined networking (SDN) and proactive moving target defense. Experiments to obtain the accuracy and effectiveness of the implemented methods, as well as an analysis of the performance concerns, were carried out through simulation using a Mininet network emulator. The experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal, which provides high rates of detection, not only in pure SDN environments but also in mixed ones.