Security analysis of forwarding strategies in network time measurements using Openflow

Abstract

Reliable network time measurement tools are important to ensure that monitoring network systems work properly, but their development do not consider security as a concern and, for example, delay attacks could compromise those tools effectiveness. Indeed, nowadays the network time measurement is not always reliable. Some researches do propose to increase network time measurement reliability using Openflow. Nonetheless, those researches do not consider the impact of altering some of the Openflow controller algorithms in their analysis. On one hand, this paper investigates how the provided POX Openflow Controller packet forwarding strategies could be applied to compromise network time measurement reliability. On the other hand, this paper also shows that the way those strategies are applied could prevent against new attacks that need to trust on network time measurement. Therefore, some experiments were performed to show the impact of the POX packet forwarding algorithms on network time measurement, either to compromise or to help in protecting the network.