Materials, Methods & Technologies, Volume 17, 2023

Abstract: A firewall is the defensive guard of a network. It is an application that has sets of rules configured on it to prevent the network from unwanted viruses and attacks. Multi-controller techniques ensure that the firewall applications in a network function consistently. The working mechanism of a software- defined network (SDN) is based on the control and data planes. The data plane forwards packets to the targeted destinations. The control plane is the brain of an SDN. It plays a vital role in policy creation and its implementation according to defined rules or by creating new rules. Researchers around the world are working on the development of firewall applications to mitigate attacks and critical data losses (data theft and data loss) in SDNs. During this review study, we discovered that almost every research on SDN firewall applications has used a threshold limit for the number and size of packets. Conversely, very little research has been conducted on the multi-controller approach. However, there are the disadvantages of identifying packet information on a layer basis and a lack of network availability. Without packet-type information, it is difficult to identify an attacker. We compared and analyzed different methods of firewalls for securing SDNs by studying approximately 75 different studies related to SDN security. Furthermore, we provided a detailed overview and techniques for SDN protection.