Taking Control of SDN-Based Cloud Systems Via the Data Plane
Taking Control of SDN-based Cloud Systems via the Data Plane Kashyap Thimmaraju Bhargava Shastry Tobias Fiebig Felicitas Hetzelt Security in Security in Faculty of Technology, Security in Telecommunications Telecommunications Policy and Management Telecommunications TU Berlin TU Berlin TU Delft TU Berlin Berlin, Germany Berlin, Germany Delft, Netherlands Berlin, Germany kash@sect:tu-berlin:de bshastry@sect:tu-berlin:de t:fiebig@tudelft:nl file@sect:tu-berlin:de Jean-Pierre Seifert Anja Feldmann Stefan Schmid∗† Security in Internet Network Faculty of Computer Telecommunications Architectures Science TU Berlin TU Berlin University of Vienna Berlin, Germany Berlin, Germany Vienna, Austria jpseifert@sect:tu-berlin:de anja@inet:tu-berlin:de schmiste@univie:ac:at ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Virtual switches are a crucial component of SDN-based cloud sys- Network Isolation; Network Virtualization; Data Plane Security; tems, enabling the interconnection of virtual machines in a flexible Packet Parsing; MPLS; Virtual Switches; Open vSwitch; Cloud Se- and “software-defined” manner. This paper raises the alarm onthe curity; OpenStack; Attacker Models; ROP; SDN; NFV security implications of virtual switches. In particular, we show that virtual switches not only increase the attack surface of the cloud, 1 INTRODUCTION but virtual switch vulnerabilities can also lead to attacks of much higher impact compared to traditional switches. Modern cloud systems such as OpenStack [1], Microsoft Azure [2] We present a systematic security analysis and identify four de- and Google Cloud Platform [3] are designed for programmabil- sign decisions which introduce vulnerabilities. Our findings moti- ity, (logically) centralized network control and global visibility. vate us to revisit existing threat models for SDN-based cloud setups, These tenets also lie at the heart of Software-defined Networking and introduce a new attacker model for SDN-based cloud systems (SDN) [4, 5] which enables cloud providers to efficiently utilize their using virtual switches.
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