Exploiting the Vulnerability of Flow Table Overflow in Software-Defined Network: Attack Model, Evaluation, and Defense

Yadong Zhou,Yazhe Tang,Junyuan Leng,Junjie Zhang,Kaiyue Chen

doi:10.1155/2018/4760632

Yadong Zhou, Yazhe Tang + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/4760632

Copy DOI

Abstract

As the most competitive solution for next-generation network, SDN and its dominant implementation OpenFlow are attracting more and more interests. But besides convenience and flexibility, SDN/OpenFlow also introduces new kinds of limitations and security issues. Of these limitations, the most obvious and maybe the most neglected one is the flow table capacity of SDN/OpenFlow switches. In this paper, we proposed a novel inference attack targeting at SDN/OpenFlow network, which is motivated by the limited flow table capacities of SDN/OpenFlow switches and the following measurable network performance decrease resulting from frequent interactions between data and control plane when the flow table is full. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposed inference attack model of this kind for SDN/OpenFlow. We implemented an inference attack framework according to our model and examined its efficiency and accuracy. The evaluation results demonstrate that our framework can infer the network parameters (flow table capacity and usage) with an accuracy of 80% or higher. We also proposed two possible defense strategies for the discovered vulnerability, including routing aggregation algorithm and multilevel flow table architecture. These findings give us a deeper understanding of SDN/OpenFlow limitations and serve as guidelines to future improvements of SDN/OpenFlow.

Highlights

By decoupling the control plane from the data plane, Software-Defined Network (SDN) makes programmability a built-in feature for networks, thereby introducing automaticity and flexibility to the networking management
In this paper we made the following contributions: (i) We have identified a novel vulnerability introduced by the limited flow table capacities of SDN/OpenFlow switches and formalized that threat
We have explored the structure of SDN/ OpenFlow network and some of the possible security issues it brings

Summary

Introduction

By decoupling the control plane from the data plane, Software-Defined Network (SDN) makes programmability a built-in feature for networks, thereby introducing automaticity and flexibility to the networking management. Similar to any networked service, secure channels between controllers and switches might be disrupted by DDoS attacks; like firewall rules, the flow entries may conflict with each other, leaking unwanted traffic; malicious arp spoofing generated by attackers may poison the controller MAC table, disturbing the normal topology information gathering and packet forwarding; untrusted applications may instrument SDN controller to perform malicious behaviors without proper access control, which is one of the design objectives for modern operating systems. [2] evaluates man-in-themiddle attacks that target at SDN/OpenFlow secure channels; FortNOX [3] brings security enforcement module into NOX [4] and enables real-time flow entry conflict check; VeriFlow [5] detects network-wide invariant violations by acting as a transparent layer between control plane and data plane

Results

Discussion

Conclusion