Software-Defined Network (SDN) is an established networking paradigm that separates the control plane from the data plane. It has central network control, and programmability facilities, therefore SDN can improve network flexibility, management, performance, and scalability. The programmability and centralization of control planes in SDN have improved network functions but also exposed it to security challenges such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that target both control and data planes. This paper proposes an effective detection technique against DDoS attack in SDN data plane and control plane. For the control plane, the technique detects DDoS attacks through a Deep Learning (DL) model using new features extracted from traffic statistics. A DL method (AE-BGRU) for DDoS detection uses Autoencoder (AE) with Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BGRU). The proposed features for the …