Journal of Information Systems and Informatics
Vol 8 No 1 (2026): February

Towards Self-Defending SDN Infrastructures: Real-Time Honeypot-Enabled Botnet Detection Using ONOS

Kaare, Nyamwaga M (Unknown)
Sam, Anael Elikana (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
12 Feb 2026

Abstract

Modern Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), while benefiting from centralized programmability, remain vulnerable to fast-evolving botnet attacks. This paper presents and evaluates a lightweight ONOS-based honeypot and decoy framework designed to detect and automatically block multi-vector botnet behaviors in real time. The system integrates honeypot-exposed Telnet, SMB, and DNS services with threshold-, entropy-, signature-, and correlation-based inspection within a tree topology (depth = 2, fanout = 4) consisting of five OpenFlow switches and 50 hosts. Quantitatively, the system achieved 100% detection of all signature-based attacks (55/55), 100% blocking of distributed UDP scans (50/50), and 0% false positives on benign decoy access. Median detection latency ranged between 1–3 seconds. True positives (TP), false negatives (FN), false positives (FP), and true negatives (TN) were measured using ground-truth attacker lists built into automated test scripts, yielding precision and recall of 1.00 across all malicious scenarios. This work demonstrates that combining deception with SDN-level flow automation enables effective and computationally efficient botnet defense without machine learning. A key limitation is that all evaluations were conducted exclusively in a controlled Mininet simulation, which may not fully represent real-world traffic dynamics. Future work will validate the system on physical SDN deployments and evaluate its robustness under production workloads.

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

isi

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Journal-ISI is a scientific article journal that is the result of ideas, great and original thoughts about the latest research and technological developments covering the fields of information systems, information technology, informatics engineering, and computer science, and industrial engineering ...