Detecting Adversarial State Manipulation in In-Network Fast ReRoute Systems

Abstract

High-speed programmable data planes provide opportunities to implement data-driven fast reroute systems that quickly adapt to varying network conditions (e.g., congestion, failures) and improve network performance. The core of these systems has packet-processing algorithms running in the data plane that continuously look for traffic patterns (e.g., too many retransmissions) specific to a network condition (e.g., link failure) and take appropriate action (e.g., reroute). Despite their benefits, they also increase the potential attack surface. Adversaries can generate malicious traffic patterns resembling those anticipated by a fast reroute system and trick the system. Doing so would lead to poor network performance due to incorrect reroute decisions. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to detect whether the fast reroute systems are under the influence of malicious traffic patterns. Our key idea is to model the expected behavior using benign traffic features and use the model as a reference to determine whether the system is under the influence of adversaries. Using realistic attack traces, we demonstrate attacks on two fast reroute systems and successfully detect those attacks using the proposed detection mechanism.