Nicholas Gray is a PhD student at the University of Würzburg, Germany, where he also completed his Master's thesis in 2015. His research interests include SDN/NFV architectures and their impact on network security. Thomas Zinner received his Diploma and Ph.D degrees in computer science from the University of Wurzburg, Germany, in 2007 and 2012, respectively. Nicholas is a member of the research group headed by Thomas on “Next Generation Networks” at the Chair of Communication Networks, University of Würzburg.

This episode is about FlowFuzz, a framework for fuzzing OpenFlow-enabled software and hardware switches. It covers the material

presented by Nicholas at Black Hat Briefings on July 26, in a session with the following abstract:

Software-defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm which

aims for increasing the flexibility of current network deployments by

separating the data from the control plane and by providing

programmable interfaces to configure the network. Resulting in a more

agile and eased network management and therefore in cost savings, SDN

is already deployed in live networks i.e. Google's B4 backbone and

NOKIA's cloud infrastructure. Despite these benefits, SDN broadens the

attack surface as additional networking devices and protocols are

deployed. Due their critical role within the softwarized management of

the network, these devices and protocols are high ranked targets for

potential attackers and thus require extensive testing and hardening.

In this work, we present FlowFuzz a fuzzing framework for SDN-enabled

software and hardware switches. In particular we focus on the OpenFlow

protocol which is currently the de facto standard communication

protocol between SDN-enabled switches and the central controlling

instance. Whereas the framework utilizes the output of conventional

tools such as AddressSanitizer for investigating software switches, it

also evaluates data obtained from side channels, i.e., processing times

and power consumption to identify unique code execution paths within

hardware switches to optimize the fuzzing process. Furthermore, we use

our framework implementation to perform a first evaluation of the Open

vSwitch and a total of four SDN-enabled hardware switches. We conclude

by presenting our findings and outline future extensions of the fuzzing

framework.

For more information on the group that produced this research, please visit sardine-project.org.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space

Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.