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Filters: Author is James Landry, MIT Lincoln Laboratory  [Clear All Filters]
2018-10-15
Benjamin E. Ujcich, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Samuel Jero, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Anne Edmundson, Princeton University, Qi Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Richard Skowyra, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, James Landry, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Adam Bates, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, William H. Sanders, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Northeastern University, Hamed Okhravi, MIT Lincoln Laboratroy.  2018.  Cross-App Poisoning in Software-Defined Networking. 2018 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Software-defined networking (SDN) continues to grow in popularity because of its programmable and extensible control plane realized through network applications (apps). However, apps introduce significant security challenges that can systemically disrupt network operations, since apps must access or modify data in a shared control plane state. If our understanding of how such data propagate within the control plane is inadequate, apps can co-opt other apps, causing them to poison the control plane’s integrity. 

We present a class of SDN control plane integrity attacks that we call cross-app poisoning (CAP), in which an unprivileged app manipulates the shared control plane state to trick a privileged app into taking actions on its behalf. We demonstrate how role-based access control (RBAC) schemes are insufficient for preventing such attacks because they neither track information flow nor enforce information flow control (IFC). We also present a defense, ProvSDN, that uses data provenance to track information flow and serves as an online reference monitor to prevent CAP attacks. We implement ProvSDN on the ONOS SDN controller and demonstrate that information flow can be tracked with low-latency overheads.