Novel MITM Attacks on Security Protocols in SDN: A Feasibility Study

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new paradigm that offers services and applications great power to manage network. Based on the consideration that the entire network visibility is the foundation of SDN, many attacks emerge in poisoning the network visibility, which lead to severe damage. Meanwhile, many defense approaches are proposed to patch the controller. It is noticed that powerful adversaries can bypass existing approaches to poison topology information and attack security protocols. In this paper, we present a method that the adversary can attack security protocols under existing approaches (e.g. TopoGuard, SPHINX). We also investigate a number of security protocols that may be compromised by our MITM attacks and propose an approach to detect the existence of the adversary. Our evaluation shows that the defense solution can effectively detect the fake link in normal environment. We hope our research can attract more attention on SDN security.