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Protecting the Data Plane of SDN From Malicious Flow Entries Based on P4

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Security and Privacy in Digital Economy (SPDE 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1268))

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Abstract

In Software-defined network (SDN), the switching devices on the data plane rely on the flow entries issued by controllers to forward packets. Therefore, the correctness of flow entries becomes critical. However, the lack of security mechanism in SDN architecture makes the packet forwarding on the data plane easy to be damaged by malicious flow entries. In this paper, we argue that a malicious controller can easily issue malicious flow entries to hinder packets from being forwarded correctly on the data plane. We present a scheme based on P4 to detect and locate malicious flow entries on the data plane. Moreover, we implement the prototype of our scheme and extensive experiments to show that the proposed scheme can prevent malicious flow entries from damaging the packet forwarding of the data plane with trivial overheads.

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Acknowledgement

The research is partly supported by the National Key Research and Development Project (2017YFB0801805), the Science and Technology on Communication Information Security Control Laboratory under Grant No. 6142106180102 and Nation Natutal Science Foundation of China No. 62072359.

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Correspondence to Li Yang .

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Zhi, Y., Yang, L., Yang, G., Zhang, Y. (2020). Protecting the Data Plane of SDN From Malicious Flow Entries Based on P4. In: Yu, S., Mueller, P., Qian, J. (eds) Security and Privacy in Digital Economy. SPDE 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1268. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9129-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9129-7_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-9128-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-9129-7

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