Vulnerabilities and Attacks of Inter-device Coordination in Programmable Networks

In programmable networks, some networking systems coordinate data plane switches to realize in-network functions (e.g., in-band network telemetry). However, the vulnerabilities of inter-device coordination are still largely unknown and neglected, which is highly concerning given the increasing popularity of this paradigm. In this paper, we identify three attack scenarios built upon such vulnerabilities, where attackers mislead the behaviors of networking systems that exploit inter-device coordination to execute in-network functions. We implement 20 existing networking systems on Tofino-based switches and a simulator, and attack these systems with the identified attacks. The experimental results indicate that our attacks significantly interfere with the normal operations of the selected networking systems, e.g., the cache hit rate of NetCache drops 38%. Our analysis also demonstrates that none of existing methods can fully mitigate our attacks since they fail to verify the packets for inter-device coordination.