With the advances in cloud computing and virtualization technologies, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has become a fertile ground for building network applications regarding management and security using the OpenFlow protocol giving access to the forwarding plane. This paper presents an analysis and evaluation of OpenFlow message usage for supporting network security applications. After describing the considered security attacks, we present mitigation and defence strategies that are currently used in SDN environments to tackle them. We then analyze the dependencies of these mechanisms to OpenFlow messages that support their instantiation. Finally, we conduct series of experiments on software and hardware OpenFlow switches in order to validate our analysis and quantify the limits of current security mechanisms with different OpenFlow implementations.