ATTAIN: An Attack Injection Framework for Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) has recently attracted interest as a way to provide cyber resiliency because of its programmable and logically centralized nature. However, the security of the SDN architecture itself against malicious attacks is not well understood and must be ensured in order to provide cyber resiliency to systems that use SDNs. In this paper, we present ATTAIN, an attack injection framework for OpenFlow-based SDN architectures. First, we define an attack model that relates system components to an attacker's capability to influence control plane behavior. Second, we define an attack language for writing control plane attacks that can be used to evaluate SDN implementations. Third, we describe an attack injector architecture that actuates attacks in networks. Finally, we evaluate our framework with an enterprise network case study by writing and running attacks with popular SDN controllers.