SENSS: Software Defined Security Service

Network attacks have long been an important problem, and have attracted a lot of research in academic and commercial sector. With a rapidly growing number of critical as well as business applications deployed on the Internet today, network attacks have both become more lucrative for the attackers and more damaging to the victims. The implications of network attacks on the victim can be huge. For example a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) can overwhelm the victim and make it unable to handle its regular business. A large-volume DDoS attack can further cause collateral damage to traffic that shares links with the victim’s traffic, leading to large traffic drops, BGP session interruptions and routing interruptions. Besides the data plane attacks, control plane misconfigurations and attacks on the interdomain routing protocol BGP can have dire implications for victim networks. For example, the prefix-hijacking attack injects and propagates false routes to the Internet, causing victim’s traffic to be redirected to the attacker networks for sniffing, modification or dropping. Traffic sniffing and modification are very difficult to detect and mitigate, and create huge security and privacy issues for the victim, while blackholing severely affects online businesses and critical infrastructures.