Security Threats in the Data Plane of Software-Defined Networks

SDN has enabled extensive network programmability and speedy network innovations by decoupling the control plane from the data plane. However, the separation of the two planes could also be a potential threat to the whole network. Previous approaches pointed out that attackers can launch various attacks from the data plane against SDN, such as DoS attacks, topology poisoning attacks, and side-channel attacks. To address the security issues, we present a comprehensive study of data plane attacks in SDN, and propose FlowKeeper, a common framework to build a robust data plane against different attacks. FlowKeeper enforces port control of the data plane and reduces the workload of the control plane by filtering out illegal packets. Experimental results show that FlowKeeper could be used to efficiently mitigate different kinds of attacks (i.e., DoS and topology poisoning attacks).

Introduction

Software-defined networking (SDN) is regarded as one of the most promising architectures for next generation computer networks. By separating the ossified network infrastructure into control plane and data plane, SDN allows operators to dynamically control network traffic via controller applications with high programmability. In SDN, the centralized control plane operates like a brain to manage and control network flows, while the data plane works as a body to process each flow based on the decisions of the control plane. The communications between the two planes are supervised by a “southbound” protocol (i.e., OpenFlow [1]). In recent years, OpenFlow networks have been adopted in data centers [2] and 5G networks [3].