Mitigating ARP Cache Poisoning Attack in Software-Defined Networking (SDN): A Survey

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a widely used protocol that provides a mapping of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to Media Access Control (MAC) addresses in local area networks. This protocol suffers from many spoofing attacks because of its stateless nature and lack of authentication. One such spoofing attack is the ARP Cache Poisoning attack, in which attackers poison the cache of hosts on the network by sending spoofed ARP requests and replies. Detection and mitigation of ARP Cache Poisoning attack is important as this attack can be used by attackers to further launch Denial of Service (DoS) and Man-In-The Middle (MITM) attacks. As with traditional networks, an ARP Cache Poisoning attack is also a serious concern in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and consequently, many solutions are proposed in the literature to mitigate this attack. In this paper, a detailed survey on various solutions to mitigate ARP Cache Poisoning attack in SDN is carried out. In this survey, various solutions are classified into three categories: Flow Graph based solutions; Traffic Patterns based solutions; IP-MAC Address Bindings based solutions. All these solutions are critically evaluated in terms of their working principles, advantages and shortcomings. Another important feature of this survey is to compare various solutions with respect to different performance metrics, e.g., attack detection time, ARP response time, calculation of delay at the Controller etc. In addition, future research directions are also presented in this survey that can be explored by other researchers to propose better solutions to mitigate the ARP Cache Poisoning attack in SDN.