Using USC secure channels to work with devices

The unified secure channel (USC) is an OpenDaylight project geared to enable secured and performant communication channels between the SDN controller and network elements within wide area networks. Lately, we have seen a growth in the type of elements being part of an enterprise network, cloud infrastructure, IoT devices, and network devices (NETCONF, OpenFlow, and so on). USC provides centralized management of communication channels, allowing the establishment and removal of those pipelines. Finally, it provides statistics regarding the written and read bytes through a given channel.

The project architecture contains the USC plugin responsible for the communication between the controller and the network elements, supporting the TLS and DTLS protocols. It also maintains the live connections through inbound and outbound channels. The USC manager provides high availability, clustering, security, and monitoring of the channel itself. The USC UI allows you to visualize the current, established channels along with some information, and the USC agent, supposed to run in the network elements, is a proxy used to maintain the live connection by allowing inbound and outbound channels to communicate with the controller.