GwPFV: A novel packet forwarding verification mechanism based on gateways in SDN-based storage environment

Aiming at SDN-based storage environment, the integrity and availability of storage service are threatened by many attacks from data plane, such as packet tampering and dropping. While existing packet forwarding verification methods to deal with the sophisticated attacks are extremely limited due to the assumption that all or part of the switches are trusted. In this paper, for the untrusted data plane, a transparent gateway-based packet forwarding verification mechanism, named GwPFV, was designed to mitigate and trace back the attacks, specially utilizing the characteristics of TCP protocol to realize a packet obfuscation method to proactively defend attacks, a fast event-counting method to find attacks, and a path switching method involved with SDN controller to locate malicious switches. Finally, both the effectiveness and security of GwPFV are analyzed in depth. The experiments performed in an SDN-based prototype storage system reveal that it can achieve the security goal with relative low performance overhead.