Network Anti-Spoofing With SDN Data Plane

Yehuda Afek, Anat Bremler-Barr, Lior Shafir
INFOCOM,
2017
Conferences & Workshops
DDoS attack, NFV/SDN

Abstract

Traditional DDoS anti-spoofing scrubbers require dedicated middleboxes thus adding CAPEX, latency and complexity in the network. This paper starts by showing that the current SDN match-and-action model is rich enough to implement a collection of anti-spoofing methods. Secondly we develop and utilize advance methods for dynamic resource sharing to distribute the required mitigation resources over a network of switches.
None of the earlier attempts to implement anti-spoofing in SDN actually directly exploited the match and action power of the switch data plane. They required additional functionalities on top of the match-and-action model, and are not implementable on an SDN switch as is. Our method builds on the premise that an SDN data path is a very fast and efficient engine to perform low level primitive operations at wire speed. The solution requires a number of flow-table rules and switch-controller messages proportional to the legitimate traffic. To scale when protecting multiple large servers the flow tables of multiple switches are harnessed in a distributed and dynamic network based solution.
We have fully implemented all our methods in either OpenFlow1.5 in Open-vSwitch and in P4. The system mitigates spoofed attacks on either the SDN infrastructure itself or on downstream servers.

@inproceedings{afek2017network,
  title={Network anti-spoofing with SDN data plane},
  author={Afek, Yehuda and Bremler-Barr, Anat and Shafir, Lior},
  booktitle={IEEE INFOCOM 2017-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications},
  pages={1--9},
  year={2017},
  organization={IEEE}
}