ML-Based Delay Attack Detection and Isolation for Fault-Tolerant Software-Defined Industrial Networks

Traditional security mechanisms find difficulties in dealing with intelligent assaults in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) despite modern information and communication technologies. Furthermore, resource consumption in software-defined networks (SDNs) in industrial organizations is usually on a larger scale, and the present routing algorithms fail to address this issue. In this paper, we present a real-time delay attack detection and isolation scheme for fault-tolerant software-defined industrial networks. The primary goal of the delay attack is to lower the resilience of our previously proposed scheme, SDN-resilience manager (SDN-RM). The attacker compromises the OpenFlow switch and launches an attack by delaying the link layer discovery protocol (LLDP) packets. As a result, the performance of SDN-RM is degraded and the success rate decreases significantly. In this work, we developed a machine learning (ML)-based attack detection and isolation mechanism, which extends our previous work, SDN-RM. Predicting and labeling malicious switches in an SDN-enabled network is a challenge that can be successfully addressed by integrating ML with network resilience solutions. Therefore, we propose a delay-based attack detection and isolation scheme (DA-DIS), which avoids malicious switches from entering the routes by combining an ML mechanism along with a route-handoff mechanism. DA-DIS increases network resilience by increasing success rate and network throughput.