Detecting Malicious Switches for a Secure Software-defined Tactile Internet

The rapid development of the Internet of Things has led to demand for high-speed data transformation. Serving this purpose is the Tactile Internet, which facilitates data transfer in extra-low latency. In particular, a Tactile Internet based on software-defined networking (SDN) has been broadly deployed because of the proven benefits of SDN in flexible and programmable network management. However, the vulnerabilities of SDN also threaten the security of the Tactile Internet. Specifically, an SDN controller relies on the network status (provided by the underlying switches) to make network decisions, e.g., calculating a routing path to deliver data in the Tactile Internet. Hence, the attackers can compromise the switches to jeopardize the SDN and further attack Tactile Internet systems. For example, an attacker can compromise switches to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks to overwhelm the SDN controller, which will disrupt all the applications in the Tactile Internet. In pursuit of a more secure Tactile Internet, the problem of abnormal SDN switches in the Tactile Internet is analyzed in this article, including the cause of abnormal switches and their influences on different network layers. Then we propose an approach that leverages the messages sent by all switches to identify abnormal switches, which adopts a linear structure to store historical messages at a relatively low cost. By mapping each flow message to the flow establishment model, our method can effectively identify malicious SDN switches in the Tactile Internet and thus enhance its security.