The DUDFTO Attack: Towards Down-to-UP Timeout Probing and Dynamically Flow Table Overflowing in SDN
Jiasong Li, Yunhe Cui, Yi Chen, Guowei Shen, Chun Guo, Qing Qian · IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2025
As a new network structure, the decoupling of the control plane and forwarding plane makes Software-Defined Networking (SDN) widely used in large-scale network scenarios. However, the decoupling network architecture also brings new vulnerabilities. The flow table overflow attack is an attack strategy that can overwhelm SDN switches. Nevertheless, the existing flow table overflow attacks may fail in probing timeouts and match fields of flow entries, due to link failure, measurement of the round-trip time (RTT) of different packets, interference of hard-timeout and idle-timeout. Meanwhile, the stealthiness of the existing attacks may also reduce, as these attacks use fixed attack rate. To improve the timeout probing accuracy and the stealthiness of attack, a new flow table overflow attack strategy, DUDFTO, is proposed to accurately probe timeout settings and match fields, then stealthily overflow SDN flow tables. Firstly, it probes the match fields by measuring the one-sided transmission delay of the packets. After that, DUDFTO designs a down-to-up feedback-based timeout probing algorithm to eliminate the issues caused by high RTT, link failure, interference between hard-timeout and idle-timeout. Then, DUDFTO designs a dynamic attack packets sending algorithm to improve its stealthiness. Finally, DUDFTO probes the flow table state to stop sending new attack packets. The evaluation results demonstrate that DUDFTO outperforms the existing attacks in terms of match fields probing ability, timeout probing relative error, number of packet_in and flow_mod messages generated by the attack, rate distribution of packet_in and flow_mod messages generated during the attack, and number of detected attack packets.