Detecting man-in-the-middle attacks via hybrid quantumclassical protocol in software-defined networks

Man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks became one of the most risk attacks on OpenFlow communication channel in software-defined networking, its detection is a very hard task due there is no authentication in OpenFlow protocol. This channel is the most important in the network and is responsible for sending the control commands from the controller to the switches, so once the OpenFlow channel is hacked, the entire network is controlled by the attacker. Therefore, we propose a complementary solution to transport layer security protocol to detect man-in-the-middle attacks based on hybrid quantum-classical protocol. Based on the hybrid protocol, an easy-toimplement authentication between controller and switches depends on quantum and classical security layers. Also, detect eavesdropping on channel depending on quantum parameters. In this paper, we implement a simulation of hybrid protocol using a software-defined networking emulator for monitoring the OpenFlow channel to detect attacks, and the results showed the ease of detecting the eavesdrop and verifying the authentication of the other party with a hybrid method to get a high level of authentication.