Towards comprehensive protection for OpenFlow controllers

OpenFlow has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm to help build dynamic, adaptive and agile networks. By decoupling control plane from data plane, OpenFlow allows network operators to program a centralized intelligence, OpenFlow controller, to manage network-wide traffic flows to meet the changing needs. However, from the security's point of view, a buggy or even malicious controller could compromise the control logic, and then the entire network. Even worse, the recent attack Stuxnet on industrial control systems also indicates the similar, severe threat to OpenFlow controllers from the commercial operating systems they are running on. In this paper, we comprehensively studied the attack vectors against the OpenFlow critical component, controller, and proposed a cross layer diversity approach that enables OpenFlow controllers to detect attacks, corruptions, failures, and then automatically continue correct execution. Case studies demonstrate that our approach can protect OpenFlow controllers from threats coming from compromised operating systems and themselves.