SDN-enabled routers and switches must provide link state information to the SDN controller to create new forwarding decisions for the network elements.
Overview
Finding ID
Version
Rule ID
IA Controls
Severity
V-73093
NET-SDN-011
SV-87745r1_rule
Low
Description
Southbound APIs such as OpenFlow provide the forwarding tables to network devices such as switches and routers. SDN controllers have an abstraction of the network topology based on discovery and provisioning information provided by management and orchestration systems.
The SDN controllers use the concept of flows to identify network traffic based on predefined rules that can be statically or dynamically programmed by the SDN control software. With the network topology abstraction, they are able to determine how traffic should flow through network devices based on application data, business policy, bandwidth, and path availability. If the SDN-enabled network elements do not provide updated link state information, the SDN controller is not able to reconverge the network to verify there is reachability to all destinations.