Address Resolution Protocol (ARP): Spoofing Attack and Proposed Defense

Networks have become an integral part of today’s world. The ease of deployment, low-cost and high data rates have contributed significantly to their popularity. There are many protocols that are tailored to ease the process of establishing these networks. Nevertheless, security-wise precautions were not taken in some of them. In this paper, we expose some of the vulnerability that exists in a commonly and widely used network protocol, the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) protocol. Effectively, we will implement a user friendly and an easy-to-use tool that exploits the weaknesses of this protocol to deceive a victim’s machine and a router through creating a sort of Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack. In MITM, all of the data going out or to the victim machine will pass first through the attacker’s machine. This enables the attacker to inspect victim’s data packets, extract valuable data (like passwords) that belong to the victim and manipulate these data packets. We suggest and implement a defense mechanism and tool that counters this attack, warns the user, and exposes some information about the attacker to isolate him. GNU/Linux is chosen as an operating system to implement both the attack and the defense tools. The results show the success of the defense mechanism in detecting the ARP related attacks in a very simple and efficient way.

Edge-Computing with Graph Computation:A Novel Mechanism to Handle Network Intrusion and Address Spoofing in SDN

Software Defined Networking(SDN)being an emerging network control model is widely recognized as a control and management platform.This model provides efficient techniques to control and manage the enterprise network.Another emerging paradigm is edge computing in which data processing is performed at the edges of the network instead of a central controller.This data processing at the edge nodes reduces the latency and bandwidth requirements.In SDN,the controller is a single point of failure.Several security issues related to the traditional network can be solved by using SDN central management and control.Address Spoofing and Network Intrusion are the most common attacks.These attacks severely degrade performance and security.We propose an edge computing-based mechanism that automatically detects and mitigates those attacks.In this mechanism,an edge system gets the network topology from the controller and the Address Resolution Protocol(ARP)traffic is directed to it for further analysis.As such,the controller is saved from unnecessary processing related to addressing translation.We propose a graph computation based method to identify the location of an attacker or intruder by implementing a graph difference method.By using the correct location information,the exact attacker or intruder is blocked,while the legitimate users get access to the network resources.The proposed mechanism is evaluated in a Mininet simulator and a POX controller.The results show that it improves system performance in terms of attack mitigation time,attack detection time,and bandwidth requirements.