2,158 research outputs found
SDN Access Control for the Masses
The evolution of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has so far been
predominantly geared towards defining and refining the abstractions on the
forwarding and control planes. However, despite a maturing south-bound
interface and a range of proposed network operating systems, the network
management application layer is yet to be specified and standardized. It has
currently poorly defined access control mechanisms that could be exposed to
network applications. Available mechanisms allow only rudimentary control and
lack procedures to partition resource access across multiple dimensions.
We address this by extending the SDN north-bound interface to provide control
over shared resources to key stakeholders of network infrastructure: network
providers, operators and application developers. We introduce a taxonomy of SDN
access models, describe a comprehensive design for SDN access control and
implement the proposed solution as an extension of the ONOS network controller
intent framework
A model for the analysis of security policies in service function chains
Two emerging architectural paradigms, i.e., Software Defined Networking (SDN)
and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), enable the deployment and management
of Service Function Chains (SFCs). A SFC is an ordered sequence of abstract
Service Functions (SFs), e.g., firewalls, VPN-gateways,traffic monitors, that
packets have to traverse in the route from source to destination. While this
appealing solution offers significant advantages in terms of flexibility, it
also introduces new challenges such as the correct configuration and ordering
of SFs in the chain to satisfy overall security requirements. This paper
presents a formal model conceived to enable the verification of correct policy
enforcements in SFCs. Software tools based on the model can then be designed to
cope with unwanted network behaviors (e.g., security flaws) deriving from
incorrect interactions of SFs in the same SFC
Conflict detection in software-defined networks
The SDN architecture facilitates the flexible deployment of network functions. While promoting innovation, this architecture induces yet a higher chance of conflicts compared to conventional networks. The detection of conflicts in SDN is the focus of this work.
Restrictions of the formal analytical approach drive our choice of an experimental approach, in which we determine a parameter space and a methodology to perform experiments. We have created a dataset covering a number of situations occurring in SDN. The investigation of the dataset yields a conflict taxonomy composed of various classes organized in three broad types: local, distributed and hidden conflicts. Interestingly, hidden conflicts caused by side-effects of control applications‘ behaviour are completely new.
We introduce the new concept of multi-property set, and the ·r (“dot r”) operator for the effective comparison of SDN rules. With these capable means, we present algorithms to detect conflicts and develop a conflict detection prototype. The evaluation of the prototype justifies the correctness and the realizability of our proposed concepts and methodologies for classifying as well as for detecting conflicts.
Altogether, our work establishes a foundation for further conflict handling efforts in SDN, e.g., conflict resolution and avoidance. In addition, we point out challenges to be explored.
Cuong Tran won the DAAD scholarship for his doctoral research at the Munich Network Management Team, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and achieved the degree in 2022. He loves to do research on policy conflicts in networked systems, IP multicast and alternatives, network security, and virtualized systems. Besides, teaching and sharing are also among his interests
SNAP: Stateful Network-Wide Abstractions for Packet Processing
Early programming languages for software-defined networking (SDN) were built
on top of the simple match-action paradigm offered by OpenFlow 1.0. However,
emerging hardware and software switches offer much more sophisticated support
for persistent state in the data plane, without involving a central controller.
Nevertheless, managing stateful, distributed systems efficiently and correctly
is known to be one of the most challenging programming problems. To simplify
this new SDN problem, we introduce SNAP.
SNAP offers a simpler "centralized" stateful programming model, by allowing
programmers to develop programs on top of one big switch rather than many.
These programs may contain reads and writes to global, persistent arrays, and
as a result, programmers can implement a broad range of applications, from
stateful firewalls to fine-grained traffic monitoring. The SNAP compiler
relieves programmers of having to worry about how to distribute, place, and
optimize access to these stateful arrays by doing it all for them. More
specifically, the compiler discovers read/write dependencies between arrays and
translates one-big-switch programs into an efficient internal representation
based on a novel variant of binary decision diagrams. This internal
representation is used to construct a mixed-integer linear program, which
jointly optimizes the placement of state and the routing of traffic across the
underlying physical topology. We have implemented a prototype compiler and
applied it to about 20 SNAP programs over various topologies to demonstrate our
techniques' scalability
- …