DIS-Guard: Enhancing SDN resilience to topology and RCO attacks

SDN controllers employ discovery protocols with LLDP packets to discover the network topology; however, this approach is susceptible to topology attacks due to the static reuse of LLDP packets without proper origin verification or integrity checks. This paper proposes a novel form of topology attack called the Round-trip time Confusion Onslaught (RCO) attack. Our findings showcase the capability of the RCO attack to mislead the discovery service of SDN controllers and bypass the Real-time Link Verification (RLV) defence mechanism, which depends on timing features in Machine Learning (ML) models. The RCO attack significantly reduces the effectiveness of the RLV mechanism in terms of True Positive Rate (TPR), Precision, F1-score, and Cohen’s Kappa and increases the False Positive Rate (FPR). These results underscore the difficulties in achieving dependable ML accuracy in topology attack detection. Accordingly, we propose the DIS-Guard framework, designed to protect and improve the efficiency of discovery protocols within SDN controllers. This framework utilizes the mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) protocol to discover hosts proactively. Moreover, it employs a novel combination of a chaos-tent map and the proposed statistical method for link discovery. Through extensive evaluation, we illustrate DIS-Guard’s superior performance and security over the established Ryu (switches.py) controller and the RLV defence mechanism. Notably, DIS-Guard reduces host-to-host access delays, decreases LLDP packet transmission and reception significantly, and improves control channel efficiency. Collectively, these quantifiable benefits manifest the efficacy of DIS-Guard as a significantly optimized solution for SDN security and performance.