Timing SDN Control Planes to Infer Network Configurations

Abstract

In this paper, we study information leakage by control planes of Software Defined Networks. We find that the response time of an OpenFlow control plane depends on its workload, and we develop an inference attack that an adversary with control of a single host could use to learn about network configurations without needing to compromise any network infrastructure (i.e. switches or controller servers). We also demonstrate that our inference attack works on real OpenFlow hardware. To our knowledge, no previous work has evaluated OpenFlow inference attacks outside of simulation.