Toward Secure Inter-Device Coordination in Programmable Networks

doi:10.1109/TON.2025.3580638

Toward Secure Inter-Device Coordination in Programmable Networks

2025-07-08

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DOI：10.1109/TON.2025.3580638

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In programmable networks, some networking systems coordinate data plane switches to perform in-network functions (e.g., in-band network telemetry). However, the vulnerabilities associated with <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">inter-device coordination</i> remain largely unexplored and overlooked, which is highly concerning given the increasing popularity of this paradigm. In this paper, we identify three attack scenarios built upon such vulnerabilities, where attackers mislead the behaviors of networking systems. We implement 20 networking systems on Tofino-based switches and a simulator and test them against the identified attacks. Our experimental results show that our attacks severely disrupt the normal operation of these networking systems, e.g., the cache hit rate of NetCache drops by 38%. However, our analysis reveals that none of existing methods fully mitigate our attacks because they fail to verify the packets for inter-device coordination. To this end, we select characteristics from existing methods while addressing their limitations to design effective mitigation methods. Experimental results indicate that our methods perform well in mitigating our attacks and introduce acceptable overheads.

Keywords:

Programmable networks

inter-device coordination

attacks

network security

Toward Secure Inter-Device Coordination in Programmable Networks

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