SIMPLE-fying middlebox policy enforcement using SDN

By Z. Qazi, Cheng-Chun Tu, Luis Chiang, Rui Miao, Vyas Sekar, Minlan Yu. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2013

783 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Networks today rely on middleboxes to provide critical performance, security, and policy compliance capabilities. Achieving these benefits and ensuring that the traffic is directed through the desired sequence of middleboxes requires significant manual effort and operator expertise. In this respect, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a promising alternative. Middleboxes, however, introduce new aspects (e.g., policy composition, resource management, packet modifications) that fall outside the purvey of traditional L2/L3 functions that SDN supports (e.g., access control or routing). This paper presents SIMPLE, a SDN-based policy enforcement layer for efficient middlebox-specific "traffic steering''. In designing SIMPLE, we take an explicit stance to work within the constraints of legacy middleboxes and existing SDN interfaces. To this end, we address algorithmic and system design challenges to demonstrate the feasibility of using SDN to simplify middlebox traffic steering. In doing so, we also take a significant step toward addressing industry concerns surrounding the ability of SDN to integrate with existing infrastructure and support L4-L7 capabilities.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a761bc231431ce9e138526de16bc745736b0aad8

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Citations in the corpus

Software-Defined Networking for Internet of Things: A Survey (2017, background): “Adequate policy enforcement in the entire network is a challenging issue, although a few solution approaches are proposed in the literature [105], [106].”
SoftCell: scalable and flexible cellular core network architecture (2013, background): “Middleboxes: There have been many works on middleboxes recently [17, 35, 36].”
A survey on service function chaining (2016, background): “discuss the challenges in depth in their work [103].”
A Survey on Emerging SDN and NFV Security Mechanisms for IoT Systems (2019, methodology): “In this vein, the SIMPLE framework [164] is an SDNbased policy enforcement framework which simplifies the traffic forwarding among middleboxes.”
Software-Defined Network Function Virtualization: A Survey (2015, neutral): “1) SYMPLE [74]”
Hybrid SDN Networks: A Survey of Existing Approaches (2018, background): “This separation of the network control and data planes eases the network control and management [11]–[13].”
Orchestrating Virtualized Network Functions (2015, methodology): “We have generated a 3-length middlebox sequence for each traffic based on the data provided in [4] and [8].”
A Survey of Security in Software Defined Networks (2016, background): “S5 sees the same packet three times and must choose between three actions: (1) Forward to IDS1, (2) Forward back to S2 for Proxy1, and (3) Send to the destination [110].”
OpenNF (2014, methodology): “With NFV we can easily launch a new IDS instance, and with SDN we can reroute some in-progress ﬂows to the new instance [17, 32].”
E2: a framework for NFV applications (2015, background): “…traditional SDN/NFV separation of concerns that uses SDN to route packets between NFs and separately lets NFV manage those NFs [17, 21, 40]; instead, in E2, a single controller handles both the management and interconnection of NFs based on a global system view that spans application and network…”
Security in Software Defined Networks: A Survey (2015, positive): “…of traf-ﬁc through network monitoring devices is an example of economical deployment of security monitoring systems in SDN. Software-defIned Middlebox PoLicy Enforcement (SIMPLE) [89] is another example of deploying security middle-boxes without modiﬁcation in middle-boxes or SDN architectures.”
Smart Cities: A Survey on Data Management, Security, and Enabling Technologies (2017, background): “Table XIV presents some testbeds and frameworks for simulation and experimentation [379], [382], [420]–[422] for the enabling technologies.”