FADE: Detecting forwarding anomaly in software-defined networks

Packet forwarding anomaly is an abnormal network state where flows are forwarded along wrong paths. Current practice of forwarding anomaly detection in Software Defined Networks (SDN) is achieved by sending probing packets or analyzing flow statistics. However, these approaches are not effective and efficient. For example, the probing approaches cannot capture all attacks, and the statistics approaches induce high communication overheads since they collect statistics of all flows. In order to address these issues, we propose a novel scheme called FADE. FADE detects forwarding anomalies by accurately analyzing flow statistics of a minimal set of flows. It generates a small number of dedicated flow rules associated with these flows to accurately measure their statistics. Moreover, it controls the installing and timeout of these dedicated flow rules so that all dedicated flow rules generated for the same flow operate on the same set of packets. Therefore, it achieves high efficiency and accuracy in anomaly detection. We prototype FADE and implement it as an application in Opensource controller, Floodlight, and evaluate the performance by Mininet experiments. The experiment results show that FADE can detect almost all forwarding anomalies and only reduces the throughput by 4%.