Exploring Host-based Software Defined Networking and its Applications

• Main Author: MacFarland, Douglas C.
• Other Authors: Craig A. Shue, Advisor
• Format: Others
• Published: Digital WPI 2015
• Subjects: host agents; anti-reconnaissance; software defined networking
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/etd-theses/594; https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1593&context=etd-theses

Network operators need detailed understanding of their networks in order to ensure functionality and to mitigate security risks. Unfortunately, legacy networks are poorly suited to providing this understanding. While the software-defined networking paradigm has the potential to, existing switch-based implementations are unable to scale sufficiently to provide information in a fine-grained. Furthermore, as switches are inherently blind to the inner workings of hosts, significantly hindering an operator's ability to understand the true context behind network traffic. In this work, we explore a host-based software-defined networking implementation. We evaluation our implementation, showing that it is able to scale beyond the capabilities of a switch-based implementation. Furthermore, we discuss various detailed network policies that network operators can write and enforce which are impossible in a switch-based implementation. We also implement and discuss an anti-reconnaissance system that can be deployed without any additional components.