| Physical SDN-enabled switches are dependent on the SDN controller for their forwarding tables, as well as their configuration and service parameters. This information is provided to the switches via SDN management plane protocols such as Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) and Open vSwitch Database Management Protocol (OVSDB). The latter provides configuration support for OpenFlow-enabled switches such as Open vSwitch, as well as many vendor switches.
If a switch within the SDN infrastructure were to receive fictitious information from a rogue management system, the physical network topology could be altered by shutting down interfaces. Legitimate traffic could be dropped by deploying access control lists to active interfaces. By altering the network topology, the attacker would have the ability to force traffic to bypass security controls. Spoofed management plane traffic generated by a rogue management system could result in a denial-of-service attack on the switches, resulting in a network outage. Hence, it is imperative that all SDN management plane traffic is secured by encrypting the traffic using a FIPS-validated cryptographic module. |
