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  2. DEF CON
  3. DEF CON 26 (2018)
  4. Hacking the Brain: Customize Evil Protocol to Pwn an SDN Controller

Hacking the Brain: Customize Evil Protocol to Pwn an SDN Controller

Presented at DEF CON 26 (2018), Aug. 10, 2018, 1:30 p.m. (20 minutes).

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is now widely deployed in production environments with an ever-growing community. Though SDN's software-based architecture enables network programmability, it also introduces dangerous code vulnerabilities into SDN controllers. However, the decoupled SDN control plane and data plane only communicate with each other with pre-defined protocol interactions, which largely increases the difficulty of exploiting such security weaknesses from the data plane. In this talk, we extend the attack surface and introduce Custom Attack, a novel attack against SDN controllers that leverages legitimate SDN protocol messages (i.e., the custom protocol field) to facilitate Java code vulnerability exploitation. Our research shows that it was possible for a weak adversary to execute arbitrary command or manipulate data in the SDN controller without accessing the SDN controller or any applications, but only controlling a host or a switch. To the best of our knowledge, Custom Attack is the first attack that can remotely compromise SDN software stack to simultaneously cause multiple kinds of attack effects in SDN controllers. Till now we have tested 5 most popular SDN controllers and their applications and found all of them are vulnerable to Custom Attack in some degree. 14 serious vulnerabilities are discovered, all of which can be exploited remotely to launch advanced attacks against controllers (e.g., executing arbitrary commands, exfiltrating confidential files, crashing SDN service, etc.). This presentation will include: an overview of SDN security research and practices. a new attack methodology for SDN that is capable of compromising the entire network. our research process that leads to these discoveries, including technical specifics of exploits. showcases of interesting Custom Attack chains in real-world SDN projects.

Presenters:

  • Feng Xiao - Hacker
    Feng Xiao will be a Ph.D. student at The Pennsylvania State University soon. He enjoys hacking all kinds of systems as well as finding vulnerabilities. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from Wuhan University in 2018. He has published three papers (including posters) in well-known security conferences like CCS, MobiCom, ICICS etc. He was also the recipient of First Prize in 2016 China Undergraduate Security Contest, First Prize of 2015 BCTF, and Third Prize of 2015 0CTF. http://fxiao.me
  • Jianwei Huang - Hacker
    Jianwei Huang is a researcher at Wuhan University. He is interested in finding and solving security related problems.
  • Peng Liu - Raymond G. Tronzo, M.D. Professor of Cybersecurity
    Dr. Liu is a professor at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are in computer security. He has published a monograph and over 270 refereed technical papers.

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