Combination Attacks and Defenses on SDN Topology Discovery

The topology discovery service in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides the controller with a global view of the substrate network topology, allowing for central management of the entire network. Unfortunately, emerging topology attacks can poison the network topology and result in unforeseeable disasters. Although researchers have made great efforts to mitigate this problem, security hazards still exist. In this paper, we propose Invisible Assailant Attack (IAA), the first combination topology attack capable of injecting and maintaining fake links even when 12 existing defense strategies are deployed simultaneously. IAA consists of 14 attack phases that apply multiple attack strategies. Attackers skillfully disguise the attack traffic in each phase so that it looks like normal network traffic, and perform these phases in a well-planned sequence, thereby bypassing existing defenses step by step. To mitigate this attack, we propose a Route Path Verification (RPV) mechanism that orchestrates multiple defense strategies to identify fake links. According to the experiments, RPV can successfully detect IAA with low overhead: its detection completes within 1 ms while its per-flow storage consumption is only a few KB.