Analysis of Denial-of-Service Attack Vectors in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Software Defined Networking is a new emerging technology that is quickly gaining popularity amongst the largest corporations. However, this new networking paradigm has a centralized point of failure at the controller. With this choke point, it is imperative that it be designed with security at the forefront. This research aims to shed light on one of the possible ways that having a centralized point of failure in the network can provide malicious attackers an avenue to disrupt an entire enterprise network. Two experiments are performed. The first experiment confirms a discovered vulnerability in a hardware switch. The second, to see if generating fake malicious software switches on the network is enough to inflate the Java Virtual Machine Heap to capacity and cause the controller to crash.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 23, 2017
Accession Number
AD1054736

Entities

People

  • Anthony A. Portante

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Computer Network Security
  • Computer Networks
  • Computer Programming
  • Computers
  • Cyberattacks
  • Cybersecurity
  • Cyberspace Operations
  • Denial Of Service Attack
  • Governments
  • Information Operations
  • Insider Threats
  • Network Architecture
  • Operating Systems
  • Software Defined Networks
  • Transport Protocols
  • United States Government

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  • Political Violence and Terrorism Studies.