CVE-2017-1000411

Technical Description

OpenFlow Plugin and OpenDayLight Controller versions Nitrogen, Carbon, Boron, Robert Varga, Anil Vishnoi contain a flaw when multiple 'expired' flows take up the memory resource of CONFIG DATASTORE which leads to CONTROLLER shutdown. If multiple different flows with 'idle-timeout' and 'hard-timeout' are sent to the Openflow Plugin REST API, the expired flows will eventually crash the controller once its resource allocations set with the JVM size are exceeded. Although the installed flows (with timeout set) are removed from network (and thus also from controller's operations DS), the expired entries are still present in CONFIG DS. The attack can originate both from NORTH or SOUTH. The above description is for a north bound attack. A south bound attack can originate when an attacker attempts a flow flooding attack and since flows come with timeouts, the attack is not successful. However, the attacker will now be successful in CONTROLLER overflow attack (resource consumption). Although, t

Remediation

Check the references section for vendor advisories and patches from opendaylight. Update opendaylight to the latest patched version. If immediate patching is not possible, review the CVSS vector to understand the attack surface and apply compensating controls such as network segmentation or access restrictions.

Affected Products

References