Robust and lightweight fault localization

Abstract

The current network is vulnerable to various attacks, e.g., source spoofing and flow hijacking attacks, which can be constructed by misconfigurations or compromising routers. Unfortunately, both users and network operators are unable to localize these faults. Existing fault localization mechanisms detect such attacks under an assumption that localization is performed upon reliable communication channels. In this paper, we will relax the assumption and propose a robust and lightweight dataplane fault localization (RFL) protocol that aims to achieve source authenticity and path compliance in unreliable communication channels. RFL uses symmetric keys to build secure detection channels and samples packets for localization on the channels such that it can detect and localize faults. In particular, the localization performed is not impacted by the reliability of the communication channels, e.g., the packets that used to localize faults are dropped. We prototype of RFL on Click routers and the experiment results with the prototype demonstrate that RFL achieves more than 99.5% localization accuracy, while only incurring around 10% throughput degradation.