Malicious Packet Injection on Software-Defined Networking as a Strategy to Improve Security

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to cloud computing that facilitates network management and enables programmability and efficient network configuration to improve network performance and monitoring. SDN has recently attracted a lot of interest given its cyber-attack resiliency through the use of controllers which helps network engineers and administrators to administer the network remotely. However, there is a need to investigate its resilience against attacks and hardened the technology to provide a secure network environment. In this paper, we examine the effects of security attacks by using an SDN penetration tool called SDN penetration tool to inject attacks into the SDN controller which, in our case, is the floodlight controller. We focused on three attacks: the Address Resolution Protocol Spoofing, man-in-the-middle, and distributed denial-of-service attacks. The simulations were run on Mininet, and the penetration tool enabled the observation of the effects of the attacks using throughput and the round-trip time metrics. The results show that the controller is vulnerable to the three attacks and that the attacks do affect the normal operation of the network since they degraded the throughput and increased the delivery time of packets which increases the round-trip time.