556 research outputs found
Outsmarting Network Security with SDN Teleportation
Software-defined networking is considered a promising new paradigm, enabling
more reliable and formally verifiable communication networks. However, this
paper shows that the separation of the control plane from the data plane, which
lies at the heart of Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), introduces a new
vulnerability which we call \emph{teleportation}. An attacker (e.g., a
malicious switch in the data plane or a host connected to the network) can use
teleportation to transmit information via the control plane and bypass critical
network functions in the data plane (e.g., a firewall), and to violate security
policies as well as logical and even physical separations. This paper
characterizes the design space for teleportation attacks theoretically, and
then identifies four different teleportation techniques. We demonstrate and
discuss how these techniques can be exploited for different attacks (e.g.,
exfiltrating confidential data at high rates), and also initiate the discussion
of possible countermeasures. Generally, and given today's trend toward more
intent-based networking, we believe that our findings are relevant beyond the
use cases considered in this paper.Comment: Accepted in EuroSP'1
Progressive Network Deployment, Performance, and Control with Software-defined Networking
The inflexible nature of traditional computer networks has led to tightly-integrated systems that are inherently difficult to manage and secure. New designs move low-level network control into software creating software-defined networks (SDN). Augmenting an existing network with these enhancements can be expensive and complex. This research investigates solutions to these problems. It is hypothesized that an add-on device, or shim could be used to make a traditional switch behave as an OpenFlow SDN switch while maintaining reasonable performance. A design prototype is found to cause approximately 1.5% reduction in throughput for one ow and less than double increase in latency, showing that such a solution may be feasible. It is hypothesized that a new design built on event-loop and reactive programming may yield a controller that is higher-performing and easier to program. The library node-openflow is found to have performance approaching that of professional controllers, however it exhibits higher variability in response rate. The framework rxdn is found to exceed performance of two comparable controllers by at least 33% with statistical significance in latency mode with 16 simulated switches, but is slower than the library node-openflow or professional controllers (e.g., Libfluid, ONOS, and NOX). Collectively, this work enhances the tools available to researchers, enabling experimentation and development toward more sustainable and secure infrastructur
Deliverable DJRA1.2. Solutions and protocols proposal for the network control, management and monitoring in a virtualized network context
This deliverable presents several research proposals for the FEDERICA network, in different subjects, such as monitoring, routing, signalling, resource discovery, and isolation. For each topic one or more possible solutions are elaborated, explaining the background, functioning and the implications of the proposed solutions.This deliverable goes further on the research aspects within FEDERICA. First of all the architecture of the control plane for the FEDERICA infrastructure will be defined. Several possibilities could be implemented, using the basic FEDERICA infrastructure as a starting point. The focus on this document is the intra-domain aspects of the control plane and their properties. Also some inter-domain aspects are addressed. The main objective of this deliverable is to lay great stress on creating and implementing the prototype/tool for the FEDERICA slice-oriented control system using the appropriate framework. This deliverable goes deeply into the definition of the containers between entities and their syntax, preparing this tool for the future implementation of any kind of algorithm related to the control plane, for both to apply UPB policies or to configure it by hand. We opt for an open solution despite the real time limitations that we could have (for instance, opening web services connexions or applying fast recovering mechanisms). The application being developed is the central element in the control plane, and additional features must be added to this application. This control plane, from the functionality point of view, is composed by several procedures that provide a reliable application and that include some mechanisms or algorithms to be able to discover and assign resources to the user. To achieve this, several topics must be researched in order to propose new protocols for the virtual infrastructure. The topics and necessary features covered in this document include resource discovery, resource allocation, signalling, routing, isolation and monitoring. All these topics must be researched in order to find a good solution for the FEDERICA network. Some of these algorithms have started to be analyzed and will be expanded in the next deliverable. Current standardization and existing solutions have been investigated in order to find a good solution for FEDERICA. Resource discovery is an important issue within the FEDERICA network, as manual resource discovery is no option, due to scalability requirement. Furthermore, no standardization exists, so knowledge must be obtained from related work. Ideally, the proposed solutions for these topics should not only be adequate specifically for this infrastructure, but could also be applied to other virtualized networks.Postprint (published version
Measurements As First-class Artifacts
The emergence of programmable switches has sparked a significant amount of
work on new techniques to perform more powerful measurement tasks, for
instance, to obtain fine-grained traffic and performance statistics. Previous
work has focused on the efficiency of these measurements alone and has
neglected flexibility, resulting in solutions that are hard to reuse or
repurpose and that often overlap in functionality or goals.
In this paper, we propose the use of a set of reusable primitive building
blocks that can be composed to express measurement tasks in a concise and
simple way. We describe the rationale for the design of our primitives, that we
have named MAFIA (Measurements As FIrst-class Artifacts), and using several
examples we illustrate how they can be combined to realize a comprehensive
range of network measurement tasks. Writing MAFIA code does not require expert
knowledge of low-level switch architecture details. Using a prototype
implementation of MAFIA, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach and
show that the use of our primitives results in compiled code that is comparable
in size and resource usage with manually written specialized P4 code and can be
run in current hardware.Comment: Infocom 2019 extended versio
Accurate and Resource-Efficient Monitoring for Future Networks
Monitoring functionality is a key component of any network management system. It is essential for profiling network resource usage, detecting attacks, and capturing the performance of a multitude of services using the network. Traditional monitoring solutions operate on long timescales producing periodic reports, which are mostly used for manual and infrequent network management tasks. However, these practices have been recently questioned by the advent of Software Defined Networking (SDN). By empowering management applications with the right tools to perform automatic, frequent, and fine-grained network reconfigurations, SDN has made these applications more dependent than before on the accuracy and timeliness of monitoring reports. As a result, monitoring systems are required to collect considerable amounts of heterogeneous measurement data, process them in real-time, and expose the resulting knowledge in short timescales to network decision-making processes. Satisfying these requirements is extremely challenging given today’s larger network scales, massive and dynamic traffic volumes, and the stringent constraints on time availability and hardware resources. This PhD thesis tackles this important challenge by investigating how an accurate and resource-efficient monitoring function can be realised in the context of future, software-defined networks. Novel monitoring methodologies, designs, and frameworks are provided in this thesis, which scale with increasing network sizes and automatically adjust to changes in the operating conditions. These achieve the goal of efficient measurement collection and reporting, lightweight measurement- data processing, and timely monitoring knowledge delivery
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