The Challenges in SDN/ML Based Network Security : A Survey

Machine Learning is gaining popularity in the network security domain as many more network-enabled devices get connected, as malicious activities become stealthier, and as new technologies like Software Defined Networking (SDN) emerge. Sitting at the application layer and communicating with the control layer, machine learning based SDN security models exercise a huge influence on the routing/switching of the entire SDN. Compromising the models is consequently a very desirable goal. Previous surveys have been done on either adversarial machine learning or the general vulnerabilities of SDNs but not both. Through examination of the latest ML-based SDN security applications and a good look at ML/SDN specific vulnerabilities accompanied by common attack methods on ML, this paper serves as a unique survey, making a case for more secure development processes of ML-based SDN security applications.Comment: 8 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1705.0056

Wild Patterns: Ten Years After the Rise of Adversarial Machine Learning

Learning-based pattern classifiers, including deep networks, have shown impressive performance in several application domains, ranging from computer vision to cybersecurity. However, it has also been shown that adversarial input perturbations carefully crafted either at training or at test time can easily subvert their predictions. The vulnerability of machine learning to such wild patterns (also referred to as adversarial examples), along with the design of suitable countermeasures, have been investigated in the research field of adversarial machine learning. In this work, we provide a thorough overview of the evolution of this research area over the last ten years and beyond, starting from pioneering, earlier work on the security of non-deep learning algorithms up to more recent work aimed to understand the security properties of deep learning algorithms, in the context of computer vision and cybersecurity tasks. We report interesting connections between these apparently-different lines of work, highlighting common misconceptions related to the security evaluation of machine-learning algorithms. We review the main threat models and attacks defined to this end, and discuss the main limitations of current work, along with the corresponding future challenges towards the design of more secure learning algorithms.Comment: Accepted for publication on Pattern Recognition, 201