Performance penalties of resilient SDN infrastructures

Secure software and hardware are critical to the functionality and stability of the Internet as well as to its clients and services. Unfortunately, benign vulnerabilities and maliciously infiltrated backdoors can often not be identified in advance, which eliminates the possibility to mitigate them. When security assurances are not known, robust combiners can be applied to ensure resilience of networks and systems. In this work we present resilient constructions based on robust combiners for network devices in Software Defined Networking, and perform extensive evaluations to show the impact of robust combiners on the efficiency of network devices. Our results demonstrate that combining devices and software provides a reasonable performance for practical systems and is a promising approach for ensuring resilience when using potentially faulty or malicious components.