The Smaller, the Shrewder: A Simple Malicious Application Can Kill an Entire SDN Environment

Abstract

Security vulnerability assessment is an important process that must be conducted against any system before the deployment, and emerging technologies are no exceptions. Soft ware-Defined Networking (SDN) has aggressively evolved in the past few years and is now almost at the early adoption stage. At this stage, the attack surface of SDN should be thoroughly investigated and assessed in order to mitigate possible security breaches against SDN. Inspired by the necessity, we reveal three attack scenarios that leverage SDN application to attack SDNs, and test the attack scenarios against three of the most popular SDN controllers available today. In addition, we discuss the possible defense mechanisms against such application-originated attacks.