SDN-SYN PoW: Intent-Aware Adaptive SDN Defense with PoW Against multi-domain SYN Floods

arXiv:2603.06668v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The stability of Internet services is persistently challenged by the escalating scale of volumetric TCP SYN floods, as conventional defenses like SYN Cookies fail by exacerbating bandwidth depletion under modern attacks. This paper introduces SDN-SYN PoW, a novel defense architecture that synergizes non-interactive Proof-of-Work with a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) control plane, an approach particularly effective for securing the network edge in modern SD-WAN deployments. The core innovation is its ability to perform global network sensing; the SDN controller monitors real-time traffic to dynamically adjust PoW difficulty, transforming the defense from a static mechanism into an intelligent, adaptive system that surgically applies computational costs only to anomalous sources. Through rigorous experiments on a custom-built testbed, we demonstrate that SDN-SYN PoW provides substantially superior protection and, critically, that the PoW overhead remains negligible for legitimate clients, ensuring compatibility even with low-power devices.