Disrupting the SDN Control Channel via Shared Links: Attacks and Countermeasures

Software-Defined Networking (SDN). SDN enables network innovations with a centralized controller controlling the whole network through the control channel. Because the control channel delivers all network control traffic, its security and reliability are of great importance. For the first time in the literature, we propose the CrossPath attack that disrupts the SDN control channel by exploiting the shared links in paths of control traffic and data traffic. In this attack, crafted data traffic can implicitly disrupt the forwarding of control traffic in the shared links. As the data traffic does not enter the control channel, the attack is stealthy and cannot be easily perceived by the controller. In order to identify the target paths containing the shared links to attack, we develop a novel technique called adversarial path reconnaissance. Our experimental results show its feasibility and efficiency of identifying the target path. We systematically study the impacts of the attack on various network applications in a real SDN testbed. Experiments show the attack significantly degrades the performance of existing network applications and causes serious network anomalies, e.g., routing blackhole, flow table resetting, and even network-wide DoS. To defeat the CrossPath attack, we design a lightweight defense system named CrossGuard. Experiments demonstrate that it can effectively protect the control channel and quickly locate the attack flow with 98% accuracy while introducing a small overhead.