Security Policy Orchestration in SDN–Microservices Environments

Abstract

Securing SDN-microservices environments requires a coherent orchestration of identity, authentication, and authorization policies. This paper proposes an architecture integrating FreeIPA for centralized identity management, Keycloak for federated authentication using OAuth2/OIDC, Open Policy Agent for declarative policy-as-code authorization, and VXLAN for multitenant network segmentation. The proposed approach ensures end-to-end, multi-layer governance, ranging from applicationlevel access control to the orchestration of the SDN control plane via RESTCONF. Experimental validation in a distributed environment demonstrates the effective integration of federated authentication, dynamic policy evaluation based on JWT claims, and network isolation with 0% inter-tenant leakage. The results confirm the feasibility of secure orchestration aligned with Zero Trust principles, providing a modular and extensible solution for cloud-native SDN-microservices infrastructures.