On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 00:45, Victor T. <[email protected]> wrote:

> -But i was wondering about the switch, and that if the attacker keep
> creating flows at high packet rate, even if i could stop packet-in events
> from going to the controller, it would still consume switching resources
> that could affect normal user (like searching the tables for the discard
> rule).  Do you believe this is a real threat to other users? Is there some
> way to avoid it?
>

If your attacker is in a position to overwhelm the switch ASIC, they could
do so whether that switch was openflow-enabled or not - openflow doesn't
change the hardware datapath forwarding mechanism.  Most modern switch ASICs
are capable of forwarding faster than the line rate of their interfaces, so
an attack merely devolves into a "generating a lot of traffic"
denial-of-service (unless your attacker knows how to exploit a flaw in a
given ASIC, but that also doesn't make openflow different, as the ASICs are
the same).

--
Nick
_______________________________________________
openflow-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/openflow-discuss

Reply via email to