The Finest Penetration Testing Framework for Software-Defined Networks

Presented at Black Hat USA 2018, Aug. 9, 2018, 5 p.m. (60 minutes).

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is getting attention for the next-generation networking today. The key concept of SDN is to decouple the control logic from the traditional network devices so that network developers can design innovative network functions in a more flexible and programmable way. However, SDN is not always bringing advantages to us. Security experts have constantly raised security concerns about SDN, and some vulnerabilities have been uncovered in the real world. If SDN is not secure, how can we measure the security level of SDN environments? In this talk, we introduce a powerful penetration testing tool for SDN called DELTA, which is officially supported by Open Networking Foundation (ONF). First, DELTA can automate diverse published attack scenarios against various SDN components from testing to evaluating. Also, to discover unknown vulnerabilities that may exist in SDN, DELTA leverages a blackbox fuzzing technique that randomizes different control flows in SDN. It enables us to systemically reveal unknown security issues rather than the empirical and ad-hoc methods that most previous studies use. By using DELTA, anyone can easily and thoroughly test not only popular open source SDN controllers (i.e., ONOS, OpenDaylight, Floodlight, and Ryu), but also SDN-enabled switches (i.e., OpenvSwitch, HP, and Pica8) in the real world. We will show nine new attack cases that have been found by DELTA but never been announced before. Also, we will discuss: - What control flows are in SDN, and why those are important as a key feature compared to the traditional networks. - What key components and workflow of DELTA to attack the real SDN components. - Which nine new attack cases have been discovered by DELTA, and we will demonstrate it. For example, one of the new attacks violates the table condition, leading to the black hole of handling packets in the switch.

Presenters:

  • Seungsoo Lee - PhD Student, KAIST
    Seungsoo Lee is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Information Security at KAIST working with Dr. Seungwon Shin in Network and System Security (NSS) Laboratory. He received his BS degree in Computer Science from Soongsil University in Korea. He received his MS degree in Information Security from KAIST. His research interests include secure and robust SDN controller, and protecting SDN environments from threats. He is currently leading Project DELTA, which is a penetration testing tool for Software-Defined Networks(SDNs).
  • Jinwoo Kim - PhD Student, KAIST
    Jinwoo Kim is a PhD student at KAIST (School of Electrical Engineering) in South Korea. He is working with Dr. Seungwon Shin at Network and System Security Laboratory, and his research interests are building an intelligent system for enhancing network security. He is actively participating Project DELTA, which is a security assessment project for Software-Defined Networks(SDNs).
  • Seungwon Woo - Master Student, KAIST
    Seungwon Woo is a Master's student at in the Graduate School of Information Security at KAIST. He is working with Dr. Seungwon Shin at Network and System Security Laboratory. His research interests are the security of SDN controllers and SDN/NFV. He is participating Project DELTA, which is a penetration testing tool for Software-Defined Networks (SDNs).
  • Seungwon Shin - Associate Professor, KAIST
    Professor Seungwon Shin received the PhD degree in computer engineering from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Texas A&M University (Advisor, Prof. G. Gu and Prof. A. L. Narasimha Reddy). He received his MS degree and BS degree in electrical and computer engineering from KAIST. He is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST. Before joining KAIST, he has spent nine years at industry, where he devised several mission critical networking systems. He is currently a Research Associate of Open Networking Foundation (ONF), and a member of security working group at ONF. His research interests span the areas of Software Defined Networking (SDN) security, IoT (Inter of Things) security, and Botnet analysis/detection. A common thread in his research is in revealing/ understanding network threats and designing new systems/algorithms for making networked system secure. He has conducted several SDN security projects to make SDN environments more secure (e.g., FRESCO, FortNOX, and Avant-Guard) and their outputs have been published at top-tier networking/security conferences, such as ACM CCS, NDSS, and SIGCOMM-HotSDN.

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