Biblio
Through time inference attacks, adversaries fingerprint SDN controllers, estimate switches flow-table size, and perform flow state reconnaissance. In fact, timing a SDN and analyzing its results can expose information which later empowers SDN resource-consumption or saturation attacks. In the real world, however, launching such attacks is not easy. This is due to some challenges attackers may encounter while attacking an actual SDN deployment. These challenges, which are not addressed adequately in the related literature, are investigated in this paper. Accordingly, practical solutions to mitigate such attacks are also proposed. Discussed challenges are clarified by means of conducting extensive experiments on an actual cloud data center testbed. Moreover, mitigation schemes have been implemented and examined in details. Experimental results show that proposed countermeasures effectively block time inference attacks.
To gain strategic insight into defending against the network reconnaissance stage of advanced persistent threats, we recreate the escalating competition between scans and deceptive views on a Software Defined Network (SDN). Our threat model presumes the defense is a deceptive network view unique for each node on the network. It can be configured in terms of the number of honeypots and subnets, as well as how real nodes are distributed across the subnets. It assumes attacks are NMAP ping scans that can be configured in terms of how many IP addresses are scanned and how they are visited. Higher performing defenses detect the scanner quicker while leaking as little information as possible while higher performing attacks are better at evading detection and discovering real nodes. By using Artificial Intelligence in the form of a competitive coevolutionary genetic algorithm, we can analyze the configurations of high performing static defenses and attacks versus their evolving adversary as well as the optimized configuration of the adversary itself. When attacks and defenses both evolve, we can observe that the extent of evolution influences the best configurations.
In this paper, a dynamic cybersecurity protection method based on software-defined networking (SDN) is proposed, according to the protection requirement analysis for industrial control systems (ICSs). This method can execute security response measures by SDN, such as isolation, redirection etc., based on the real-time intrusion detection results, forming a detecting-responding closed-loop security control. In addition, moving target defense (MTD) concept is introduced to the protection for ICSs, where topology transformation and IP/port hopping are realized by SDN, which can confuse and deceive the attackers and prevent attacks at the beginning, protection ICSs in an active manner. The simulation results verify the feasibility of the proposed method.
Recently, data protection has become increasingly important in cloud environments. The cloud platform has global user information, rich storage resource allocation information, and a fuller understanding of data attributes. At the same time, there is an urgent need for data access control to provide data security, and software-defined network, as a ready-made facility, has a global network view, global network management capabilities, and programable network rules. In this paper, we present an approach, named High-Performance Software-Defined Data Access Network (HP-SDDAN), providing software-defined data access network architecture, global data attribute management and attribute-based data access network. HP-SDDAN combines the excellent features of cloud platform and software-defined network, and fully considers the performance to implement software-defined data access network. In evaluation, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of HP-SDDAN implementation, with only 1.46% overhead to achieve attribute-based data access control of attribute-based differential privacy.
Despite the wide of range of research and technologies that deal with the problem of routing in computer networks, there remains a gap between the level of network hardware administration and the level of business requirements and constraints. Not much has been accomplished in literature in order to have a direct enforcement of such requirements on the network. This paper presents a new solution in specifying and directly enforcing security policies to control the routing configuration in a software-defined network by using Row-Level Security checks which enable fine-grained security policies on individual rows in database tables. We show, as a first step, how a specific class of such policies, namely multilevel security policies, can be enforced on a database-defined network, which presents an abstraction of a network's configuration as a set of database tables. We show that such policies can be used to control the flow of data in the network either in an upward or downward manner.
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a major paradigm in controlling and managing number of heterogeneous networks. It's a real challenge however to secure such complex networks which are heterogeneous in network security. The centralization of the intelligence in network presents both an opportunity as well as security threats. This paper focuses on various potential security challenges at the various levels of SDN architecture such as Denial of service (DoS) attack and its countermeasures. The paper shows the detection of DoS attck with S-FlowRT.
With the interconnection of services and customers, network attacks are capable of large amounts of damage. Flexible Random Virtual IP Multiplexing (FRVM) is a Moving Target Defence (MTD) technique that protects against reconnaissance and access with address mutation and multiplexing. Security techniques must be trusted, however, FRVM, along with past MTD techniques, have gaps in realistic evaluation and thorough analysis of security and performance. FRVM, and two comparison techniques, were deployed on a virtualised network to demonstrate FRVM's security and performance trade-offs. The key results include the security and performance trade-offs of address multiplexing and address mutation. The security benefit of IP address multiplexing is much greater than its performance overhead, deployed on top of address mutation. Frequent address mutation significantly increases an attackers' network scan durations as well as effectively obfuscating and hiding network configurations.
Software Defined Network (SDN) is a revolutionary networking paradigm which provides the flexibility of programming the network interface as per the need and demand of the user. Software Defined Network (SDN) is independent of vendor specific hardware or protocols and offers the easy extensions in the networking. A customized network as per on user demand facilitates communication control via a single entity i.e. SDN controller. Due to this SDN Controller has become more vulnerable to SDN security attacks and more specifically a single point of failure. It is worth noticing that vulnerabilities were identified because of customized applications which are semi-independent of underlying network infrastructure. No doubt, SDN has provided numerous benefits like breaking vendor lock-ins, reducing overhead cost, easy innovations, increasing programmability among devices, introducing new features and so on. But security of SDN cannot be neglected and it has become a major topic of debate. The communication channel used in SDN is OpenFlow which has made TLS implementation an optional approach in SDN. TLS adoption is important and still vulnerable. This paper focuses on making SDN OpenFlow communication more secure by following extended TLS support and defensive algorithm.
Network attacks have become a growing threat to the current Internet. For the enhancement of network security and accountability, it is urgent to find the origin and identity of the adversary who misbehaves in the network. Some studies focus on embedding users' identities into IPv6 addresses, but such design cannot support the Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) protocol which is widely deployed nowadays. In this paper, we propose SDN-Ti, a general solution to traceback and identification for attackers in IPv6 networks based on Software Defined Network (SDN). In our proposal, the SDN switch performs a translation between the source IPv6 address of the packet and its trusted ID-encoded address generated by the SDN controller. The network administrator can effectively identify the attacker by parsing the malicious packets when the attack incident happens. Our solution not only avoids the heavy storage overhead and time synchronism problems, but also supports multiple IPv6 address assignment scenarios. What's more, SDN-Ti does not require any modification on the end device, hence can be easily deployed. We implement SDN-Ti prototype and evaluate it in a real IPv6 testbed. Experiment results show that our solution only brings very little extra performance cost, and it shows considerable performance in terms of latency, CPU consumption and packet loss compared to the normal forwarding method. The results indicate that SDN-Ti is feasible to be deployed in practice with a large number of users.
Software Defined Network (SDN) is getting popularity both from academic and industry. Lot of researches have been made to combine SDN with future Internet paradigms to manage and control networks efficiently. SDN provides better management and control in a network through decoupling of data and control plane. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a future Internet technique with aim to replace IPv4 addressing problems. In NDN, communication between different nodes done on the basis of content names rather than IP addresses. Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a subtype of MANET which is also considered as a hot area for future applications. Different vehicles communicate with each other to form a network known as VANET. Communication between VANET can be done in two ways (i) Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) (ii) Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I). Combination of SDN and NDN techniques in future Internet can solve lot of problems which were hard to answer by considering a single technique. Security in VANET is always challenging due to unstable topology of VANET. In this paper, we merge future Internet techniques and propose a new scheme to answer timing attack problem in VANETs named as Timing Attack Prevention (TAP) protocol. Proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations which shows the superiority of proposed protocol regarding detection and mitigation of attacker vehicles as compared to normal timing attack scenario in NDN based VANET.
Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture is a new and novel way of network management mechanism. In SDN, switches do not process the incoming packets like conventional network computing environment. They match for the incoming packets in the forwarding tables and if there is none it will be sent to the controller for processing which is the operating system of the SDN. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a biggest threat to cyber security in SDN network. The attack will occur at the network layer or the application layer of the compromised systems that are connected to the network. In this paper a machine learning based intelligent method is proposed which can detect the incoming packets as infected or not. The different machine learning algorithms adopted for accomplishing the task are Naive Bayes, K-Nearest neighbor (KNN) and Support vector machine (SVM) to detect the anomalous behavior of the data traffic. These three algorithms are compared according to their performances and KNN is found to be the suitable one over other two. The performance measure is taken here is the detection rate of infected packets.
Currently, security protection in Industrial Control Systems has become a hot topic, and a great number of defense techniques have sprung up. As one of the most effective approaches, area isolation has the exceptional advantages and is widely used to prevent attacks or hazards propagating. However, most existing methods for inter-area communication protection present some limitations, i.e., excessively depending on the analyzing rules, affecting original communication. Additionally, the network architecture and data flow direction can hardly be adjusted after being deployed. To address these problems, a dynamical and customized communication protection technology is proposed in this paper. In detail, a security inter-area communication architecture based on Software Defined Network is designed firstly, where devices or subsystems can be dynamically added into or removed from the communication link. And then, a security inspection method based on information entropy is presented for deep network behaviors analysis. According to the security analysis results, the communications in the network can be adjusted in time. Finally, simulations are constructed, and the results indicate that the proposed approach is sensitive and effective for cyber-attacks detection.
Vulnerabilities of controller that is caused by separation of control and forwarding lead to a threat which attacker can take remote access detection in SDN. The current work proposes a controller architecture called secure control plane (SCP) that enhances security and increase the difficulty of the attack through a rotation of heterogeneous and multiple controllers. Specifically, a dynamic-scheduling method based on Bayesian Stackelberg Games is put forward to maximize security reward of defender during each migration. Secondly, introducing a self-cleaning mechanism combined with game strategy aims at improving the secure level and form a closed-loop defense mechanism; Finally, the experiments described quantitatively defender will get more secure gain based on the game strategy compared with traditional strategy (pure and random strategies), and the self-cleaning mechanism can make the control plane to be in a higher level of security.
Trusted routing is a hot spot in network security. Lots of efforts have been made on trusted routing validation for Interior Gateway Protocols (IGP), e.g., using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to enhance the security of protocols, or routing monitoring systems. However, the former is limited by further deployment in the practical Internet, the latter depends on a complete, accurate, and fresh knowledge base-this is still a big challenge (Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are not willing to leak their routing policies). In this paper, inspired by the idea of centrally controlling in Software Defined Network (SDN), we propose a CENtrally Trusted Routing vAlidation framework, named CENTRA, which can automated collect routing information, centrally detect anomaly and deliver secure routing policy. We implement the proposed framework using NETCONF as the communication protocol and YANG as the data model. The experimental results reveal that CENTRA can detect and block anomalous routing in real time. Comparing to existing secure routing mechanism, CENTRA improves the detection efficiency and real-time significantly.
Spatial information network is an important part of the integrated space-terrestrial information network, its bearer services are becoming increasingly complex, and real-time requirements are also rising. Due to the structural vulnerability of the spatial information network and the dynamics of the network, this poses a serious challenge to how to ensure reliable and stable data transmission. The structural vulnerability of the spatial information network and the dynamics of the network brings a serious challenge of ensuring reliable and stable data transmission. Software Defined Networking (SDN), as a new network architecture, not only can quickly adapt to new business, but also make network reconfiguration more intelligent. In this paper, SDN is used to design the spatial information network architecture. An optimization algorithm for network self-healing based on SDN is proposed to solve the failure of switching node. With the guarantee of Quality of Service (QoS) requirement, the link is updated with the least link to realize the fast network reconfiguration and recovery. The simulation results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the delay caused by fault recovery.
With the development of the information and communications technology, new network architecture and applications keep emerging promoted by cloud computing, big data, virtualization technology, etc. As a novel network architecture, Software Defined Network (SDN) realizes separation of the control plane and the data plane, thus controlling hardware by a software platform which is known as the central controller. Through that method SDN realizes the flexible deployment of network resources. In the process of the development and application of SDN, its open architecture has exposed more and more security problem, which triggers a critical focus on how to build a secure SDN. Based on the hierarchical SDN architecture and characteristics, this paper analyzes the security threats that SDN may face in the application layer, the control layer, the resource layer and the interface layer. In order to solve those security threats, the paper presents an SDN security architecture which can provide corresponding defense ability. The paper also puts forward an enhanced access control strategy adopting an attribute-based encryption method in the SDN security architecture.
This paper proposed a new detection and prevention system against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack in SDN (software defined network) architecture, FL-GUARD (Floodlight-based guard system). Based on characteristics of SDN and centralized control, etc., FL-GUARD applies dynamic IP address binding to solve the problem of IP spoofing, and uses 3.3.2 C-SVM algorithm to detect attacks, and finally take advantage of the centralized control of software-defined network to issue flow tables to block attacks at the source port. The experiment results show the effectiveness of our system. The modular design of FL-GUARD lays a good foundation for the future improvement.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack has been bringing serious security concerns on banks, finance incorporation, public institutions, and data centers. Also, the emerging wave of Internet of Things (IoT) raises new concerns on the smart devices. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have provided a new paradigm for network security. In this paper, we propose a new method to efficiently prevent DDoS attacks, based on a SDN/NFV framework. To resolve the problem that normal packets are blocked due to the inspection on suspicious packets, we developed a threshold-based method that provides a client with an efficient, fast DDoS attack mitigation. In addition, we use open source code to develop the security functions in order to implement our solution for SDN-based network security functions. The source code is based on NETCONF protocol [1] and YANG Data Model [2].
Separation of network control from devices in Software Defined Network (SDN) allows for centralized implementation and management of security policies in a cloud computing environment. The ease of programmability also makes SDN a great platform implementation of various initiatives that involve application deployment, dynamic topology changes, and decentralized network management in a multi-tenant data center environment. Dynamic change of network topology, or host reconfiguration in such networks might require corresponding changes to the flow rules in the SDN based cloud environment. Verifying adherence of these new flow policies in the environment to the organizational security policies and ensuring a conflict free environment is especially challenging. In this paper, we extend the work on rule conflicts from a traditional environment to an SDN environment, introducing a new classification to describe conflicts stemming from cross-layer conflicts. Our framework ensures that in any SDN based cloud, flow rules do not have conflicts at any layer; thereby ensuring that changes to the environment do not lead to unintended consequences. We demonstrate the correctness, feasibility and scalability of our framework through a proof-of-concept prototype.
How to debug large networks is always a challenging task. Software Defined Network (SDN) offers a centralized con- trol platform where operators can statically verify network policies, instead of checking configuration files device-by-device. While such a static verification is useful, it is still not enough: due to data plane faults, packets may not be forwarded according to control plane policies, resulting in network faults at runtime. To address this issue, we present VeriDP, a tool that can continuously monitor what we call control-data plane consistency, defined as the consistency between control plane policies and data plane forwarding behaviors. We prototype VeriDP with small modifications of both hardware and software SDN switches, and show that it can achieve a verification speed of 3 μs per packet, with a false negative rate as low as 0.1%, for the Stanford backbone and Internet2 topologies. In addition, when verification fails, VeriDP can localize faulty switches with a probability as high as 96% for fat tree topologies.
We propose a clean-slate network architecture called Centralized Identifier Network (CIN) which jointly considers the ideas of both control plane/forwarding plane separation and identifier/locator separation. In such an architecture, a controller cluster is designed to perform routers' link states gathering and routing calculation/handing out. Meanwhile, a tailor-made router without routing calculation function is designed to forward packets and communicate with its controller. Furthermore, A router or a host owns a globally unique ID and a host should be registered to a router whose ID will be the host's location. Control plane/forwarding plane separation enables CIN easily re-splitting the network functions into finer optional building blocks for sufficient flexibility and adaptability. Identifier/locator separation helps CIN deal with serious scaling problems and offer support for host mobility. This article mainly shows the routing mechanism of CIN. Furthermore, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed mechanism.
Distributed Denial of Service attacks are a growing threat to organizations and, as defense mechanisms are becoming more advanced, hackers are aiming at the application layer. For example, application layer Low and Slow Distributed Denial of Service attacks are becoming a serious issue because, due to low resource consumption, they are hard to detect. In this position paper, we propose a reference architecture that mitigates the Low and Slow Distributed Denial of Service attacks by utilizing Software Defined Infrastructure capabilities. We also propose two concrete architectures based on the reference architecture: a Performance Model-Based and Off-The-Shelf Components based architecture, respectively. We introduce the Shark Tank concept, a cluster under detailed monitoring that has full application capabilities and where suspicious requests are redirected for further filtering.