Denial of Service Cyberattacks to Naval Software Defined-Networking-Enabled SCADA Network

Abstract

As an emerging and pragmatic network management paradigm, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides a promising solution to develop a flexible, vendor-neutral Naval Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) network by using open network protocols. Since SCADA networks are intrinsically vulnerable due to their interconnected and automated nature, Denial of Service (DoS) attack to the SDN-enabled SCADA network is studied in this paper. DoS attack is launched in the SDN network by using Mininet virtualization, Wireshark, and hping3 techniques. The idea is to understand how an attack occurs and uncover the impact of DoS attack to the SDN-enabled SCADA network, thus the corresponding defense strategies can be developed for the DoS attack. Extensive tests on Mininet have demonstrated the DoS attack results for studying the impact of DoS attack. Therefore, the defense strategies can be developed in the future study to enhance the security of the naval SCADA networks.