Link Latency Attack in Software-Defined Networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has found applications in different domains, including wired- and wireless networks. The SDN controller has a global view of the network topology, which is vulnerable to topology poisoning attacks, e.g., link fabrication and host-location hijacking. The adversaries can leverage these attacks to monitor the flows or drop them. However, current defence systems such as TopoGuard and TopoGuard+ can detect such attacks. In this paper, we introduce the Link Latency Attack (LLA) that can successfully bypass the systems' defence mechanisms above. In LLA, the adversary can add a fake link into the network and corrupt the controller's view from the network topology. This can be accomplished by compromising the end hosts without the need to attack the SDN-enabled switches. We develop a Machine Learning-based Link Guard (MLLG) system to provide the required defence for LLA. We test the performance of our system using an emulated network on Mininet, and the obtained results show an accuracy of 98.22% in detecting the attack. Interestingly, MLLG improves 16% the accuracy of TopoGuard+