Denial of Service detection and mitigation on GENI Xenia Mountrouidou, Blaine Billings, College of Charleston

Collaborative research Tommy Chin (RIT), Xenia Mountrouidou, Xiangyang Li (JHU), Kaiqi Xiong (USF), “An SDN-Supported Collaborative Approach for DDoS Flooding Detection and Containment“, International Conference for Military Communications (MILCOM 2015), Tampa, Florida, 2015 Tommy Chin, Xenia Mountrouidou, Xiangyang Li, Kaiqi Xiong, “Selective Packet Inspection to Detect DoS Flooding Using Software Defined Networking (SDN)“, International Workshop on Computer and Networking Experimental Research Using Testbeds (CNERT 2015), Columbus, Ohio, June, 2015

Outline Motivation Collaborative detection and mitigation Implementation Demo Conclusions

Motivation DDoS Threat Computer Networks Today Half of enterprises worldwide hit by DDoS attacks (Darkreading, 2014) DDoS attacks: a perfect smoke screen for APTs and silent data breaches (CSO online, 2015) $150 can buy a week long DDoS attack (TrendMicro) >2,000 DDoS attacks observed every day (Arbor Networks) 1/3 of all downtime incidents attributed to DDoS (Verisign/Merrill Research) IoT: Mirai Botnet Computer Networks Today Big data Complex topologies

Motivation SDN Capabilities Drop flows Redirect flows Duplicate flows Information available & accessible on different network layers Source: https://www.opennetworking.org/sdn-resources/sdn-definition

DDoS TCP SYN Flood Insights: Traffic pattern Spoofed IPs Send Spoofed SYN Send SYN-ACK Resend SYN-ACK Attacker Server Spoofed Client Insights: Traffic pattern Spoofed IPs

Challenges Intrusion Detection System (IDS) SDN Controller Data availability is limited Effectiveness depends on position in network SDN Controller Bottleneck – cannot analyze every packet Accuracy vs Performance Real world implementation

Solutions Discrete attack signature constituents IDS elements Increase in SYN packets Spoofed source IPs for certain DDoS instances IDS elements Distributed Communication with SDN controllers SDN controllers posses critical information Flow table Add/remove flows Duplicate flows Emulation with Global Environment for Network Innovations

Increase of normal traffic Processing overhead Attack Increase of normal traffic Network traffic Detection Stage Monitor(s) t Alert message Correlation Stage Evidence/ command Reset message Reset Correlator(s) t Mitigation Stage Attack confirmed Reset Controller(s) t

M2 Controller C2 Attacker OVS2 Client Backbone OVS OVS1 OVS3 Server Monitor M1 Server (Victim) Correlator/ Controller C1 OVS1 M2 Controller C2 Backbone OVS M3 Attacker OVS3 OVS2 C3 MB Controller CB

Monitor-Correlator Communication Controller (Correlator) Client OpenvSwitch Monitor Server Request Content Insert Flow OvS Mirror Traffic Forward Traffic Send Alert Detail Query OvS Flow Table Return Flow Table Data Insert Flow to OvS

Monitor Listen for IDS alerts Alert threshold = # SYN packets / sec Send alert flag to correlator Send IPs of selected SYN packets to correlator Flag can be attack type

Monitor – real time snort alert monitoring

Monitor – send alert to correlator

Correlator Key Value port1 IP1 port2 IP2 port3 IP3 … portn IPn Key Hash table based on the original flow table of OVS switch Query this table using the IP addresses from the monitor to look for any unknown IPs Additional queries to a second hash table created based on the current flow table Flow Table Snapshot2 Original Flow Table Flow Table Snapshot1

Correlator – parse and process flowdump

Correlator – block the port of attack

Role of SDN in Implementation Duplicate flows Flow table information detects attacker Drop flows to mitigate Duplication is implemented with Mirroring We may mitigate real traffic – flash crowd Deep packet inspection Second chance

Demo Video & Live

Conclusions and Future Work Synergistic strategy monitoring detection mitigation Scalable solution to process high volume of traffic and large scale attacks Future work Scalability optimizations Different security applications – covert channel

More security experimentation on GENI Covert Storage Channel Detection: Yiyuan Hu, Xiangyang Li, Xenia Mountrouidou, “Improving Covert Storage Channel Analysis with SDN and Experimentation on GENI“, National Cyber Summit 2016 Covert Timing Channel: ACM Research competition poster “Time Lord: Covert Timing Channel Implementation and Realistic Experimentation”, Eduardo Castillo, Xenia Mountrouidou, Xiangyang Li Moving Target Defense

Acknowledgements

Questions? Thank you!

Links Project CyberPaths: http://blogs.cofc.edu/cyberpaths/ Intrusion Detection Lab: http://mountrouidoux.people.cofc.edu/CyberPaths/intrusiondetectio nsystemgenidesk_v2.html Correlation & Mitigation lab: http://mountrouidoux.people.cofc.edu/CyberPaths/correlation_genid esk.html