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Software-defined networking (SDN) continues to grow in popularity because of its programmable and extensible control plane realized through network applications (apps). However, apps introduce significant security challenges that can systemically disrupt network operations, since apps must access or modify data in a shared control plane state. If our understanding of how such data propagate within the control plane is inadequate, apps can co-opt other apps, causing them to poison the control plane's integrity. We present a class of SDN control plane integrity attacks that we call cross-app poisoning (CAP), in which an unprivileged app manipulates the shared control plane state to trick a privileged app into taking actions on its behalf. We demonstrate how role-based access control (RBAC) schemes are insufficient for preventing such attacks because they neither track information flow nor enforce information flow control (IFC). We also present a defense, ProvSDN, that uses data provenance to track information flow and serves as an online reference monitor to prevent CAP attacks. We implement ProvSDN on the ONOS SDN controller and demonstrate that information flow can be tracked with low-latency overheads.
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Protect the System Call, Protect (Most of) the World with BASTION
System calls are a critical building block in many serious security attacks, such as control-flow hijacking and privilege escalation attacks. Security-sensitive system calls (e.g., execve, mprotect), especially play a major role in completing attacks. Yet, few defense efforts focus to ensure their legitimate usage, allowing attackers to maliciously leverage system calls in attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel System Call Integrity, which enforces the correct use of system calls throughout runtime. We propose three new contexts enforcing (1) which system call is called and how it is invoked (Call Type), (2) how a system call is reached (Control Flow), and (3) that arguments are not corrupted (Argument Integrity). Our defense mechanism thwarts attacks by breaking the critical building block in their attack chains. We implement Bastion, as a compiler and runtime monitor system, to demonstrate the efficacy of the three system call contexts. Our security case study shows that Bastion can effectively stop all the attacks including real-world exploits and recent advanced attack strategies. Deploying Bastion on three popular system call-intensive programs, NGINX, SQLite, and vsFTPd, we show Bastion is secure and practical, demonstrating overhead of 0.60%, 2.01%, and 1.65%, respectively
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- Award ID(s):
- 2153748
- PAR ID:
- 10417981
- Editor(s):
- Tor M. Aamodt; Natalie D. Enright Jerger; Michael M. Swift
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
- Volume:
- 3
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 528 to 541
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3582016.3582066
