Fingerprinting the Software Defined Networks

Abstract

Research in Software De ned Networks (SDN) has gained momentum in recent years due to unique features o ered by it. The adaptation of the technology has resulted in many SDN enabled deployments. As it provides a centralized control of a whole network. However, the centralized nature of the SDN also makes it prone to many security threats such as denial of service attacks, especially if the policy parameters of SDN are known to adversaries. So that they can attack according to the discovered parameters of the net- work. In this research work, we present how to do ngerprinting of various SDN policy parameters such as hard and soft timeouts, OpenFlow match- elds deployed by the SDN controller, mitigating policy for over owing of

ow table entries and information about topology deployed in the targeted network. An adversary can launch a carefully planned attack, especially on the SDN data plane, if these policy parameters are discovered for the SDN enabled network. It has been assumed that adversary has got access to one of the end host within the SDN domain, from which is able to generate cus- tom packets from the networking stack. E cient algorithms are proposed to discover these aforementioned policy parameters and the impact of know- ing these parameters has been discussed. The results of these ngerprinting algorithms are veri ed with SDN domain simulations in Mininet.