rDefender: A Lightweight and Robust Defense Against Flow Table Overflow Attacks in SDN

Dezhang Kong, Xiang Chen, Chunming Wu, Yi Shen, Zhengyan Zhou, Qiumei Cheng, Xuan Liu, Mingliang Yang, Yubing Qiu, Dong Zhang, Muhammad Khurram Khan

Abstract: The flow table is a critical component of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). However, flow tables’ limited capacity makes them highly vulnerable to flow table overflow attacks (FTOAs). Due to the low attack cost and highly flexible attack forms, it is hard to eradicate FTOAs. This paper addresses three unsolved problems for table security and proposes a robust defense accordingly. First, we reveal that the existing defenses with fixed defense speeds will cause severe packet loss when handling diverse traffic. We prove that deleting multiple rules can efficiently solve this problem and give a rigorous derivation to calculate the suitable deletion number according to the environment. Second, we illustrate that abnormal table occupancy squeezing is a constant characteristic of FTOAs regardless of attack forms. It can be used to identify attacked ports accurately in different scenarios. Third, we mathematically prove that random deletion can guarantee the continuous decrease of malicious flow rules after confirming attacked ports. It achieves fast speed and robust effectiveness in different environments. Based on these findings, we design rDefender, a robust and lightweight defense prototype. We evaluate its effect by designing diverse, powerful attacks and using real-world datasets and topology. The results demonstrate that it achieves the best overall performance compared to six existing mainstream defenses, providing stable security for switch flow tables.