ACLSwitch is an application for the Ryu controller that offers a distributed firewalling solution for a software defined network. Through the use of OpenFlow switches, an entire network can be protected via the filtering of network traffic. ACLSwitch also offers flexibility by providing a mechanism to group rules into policy domains. This mechanism allows multiple rules to be deployed to many switches without the need to configure each switch separately.

ACLSwitch can be configured by specifying configuration items in the appropriate YAML files under Ryu_Application/aclswitch/config. Alternatively, a command line interface can be used to configure the firewall dynamically. The command line interface assumes that ACLSwitch is running on the same machine.

Please note that the scripts used to start ACLSwitch and its respective command line interface may use paths that do not work on your machine. These can be changed by modifying the respective scripts. The start_network.sh script can be used to start a small virtual network in Mininet for testing or just to have fun.

Finally, remember that this software is open-source. Anyone is free to use or modify the code, however the original authors must be respected. The open-source nature of the software also means that there is no attached warranty. You have been warned!

Create a bash alias for running ACLSwitch. The example below assumes that the ACLSwitch directory cloned from GitHub is located in your home directory.

alias asw="cd; ryu-manager --verbose ~/ACLSwitch/Ryu_Application/controller.py ;"

ACLSwitch was originally developed as part of a final year Bachelor of Engineering Honours project (ENGR489) at Victoria University of Wellington in 2015. The original repository contains files that were necessary for the development and assessment of the honours project. This repository was established in order to foster future development by including the implementation code but none of the resources that were appropriate for ENGR489.

The original repository used in the process for the honours project can found at https://github.com/bakkerjarr/ENGR489_2015_JarrodBakker.

Software dependencies are noted down below along with the appropriate installation commands.

• netaddr

$ pip install netaddr

• netifaces

$ pip install netifaces

• prettytable

$ pip install prettytable

• requests

$ pip3 install requests

• Scapy

$ pip install Scapy

• YAML

$ apt-get install python-yaml