Topology poisoning attacks and countermeasures in SDN-enabled vehicular networks

The development of vehicular networks spawns various service scenarios, whether safety-related or infotainment-related, making people's life and travel more comfortable and efficient. As an innovative network architecture to realize centralized control, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is very beneficial to the management of complex vehicular networks. Nevertheless, its security has received little attention. If the core SDN controller is threatened, the entire vehicular network can be seriously affected. To this end, we focus on the vulnerability of SDN controller, successfully perform topology poisoning attacks on four mainstream controllers, analyze the attack impacts hierarchically, and discuss the countermeasures for security improvement. As far as we know, we are the first to explore the security of SDN controller in vehicular networks.