A Semistructured Random Identifier Protocol for Anonymous Communication in SDN Network

Abstract

Traffic analysis is an effective mean for gathering intelligence from within a large enterprise’s local network. Adversaries are able to monitor all traffic traversing a switch by exploiting just one vulnerability in it and obtain valuable information (e.g., online hosts and ongoing sessions) for further attacking, while administrators have to patch all switches as soon as possible in hope of eliminating the vulnerability in time. Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a new paradigm for reobtaining the upper hand in network defense by dynamically changing attack surfaces of the network. In this paper, we propose U-TRI (unlinkability through random identifier) as a moving target technique for changing the information-leaking identifiers within PDUs for SDN network. U-TRI is based on VIRO protocol and implemented with the help of OpenFlow protocol. U-TRI employs an independent, binary tree-structured, periodically and randomly updating identifier to replace the first part of the static MAC address in PDU, and assigns unstructured random values to the remaining part of the MAC address. U-TRI also obfuscates identifiers in the network layer and transport layer in an unstructured manner. Such a semistructured random identifier enables U-TRI to significantly weaken the linkage between identifiers and end-hosts as well as communication sessions, thus providing anonymous communication in SDN network. The result of analysis and experiments indicates that U-TRI dramatically increases the difficulty of traffic analysis with acceptable burdens on network performance.