Attack Modeling and Risk Assessments in Software Defined networking (SDN)

Abstract: Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a technology which provides a network architecture with three distinct layers that is, the application layer which is made up of SDN applications, the control layer which is made up of the controller and the data plane layer which is made up of switches. However, the exits different types of SDN architectures some of which are interconnected with the physical network. At the core of SDN, the control plane is physically and logically separated from the data plane. The controller is connected to the application layer through an interface known as the northbound interface and to the data plane through another interface known as the southbound interface. The centralized control plane uses APIs to communicate through the northbound and southbound interface with the application layer and the data plane layer respectively. By default, these APIs such as Restful and OpenFlow APIs do not implement security mechanisms like data encryption and authentication thus, this introduces new network security threats to the SDN architecture. This report presents a technique known as threat modeling in SDN. To achieve this technique, attack scenarios are created based on the OpenFlow SDN vulnerabilities. After which these vulnerabilities are defined as predicates or facts and rules, a framework known as multihost multistage vulnerability analysis (MulVAL) then takes these predicates and rules to produce a threat model known as attack graph. The attack graph is further used to performed quantitative risk analysis using a metric to depict the risks associated to the OpenFlow SDN model