SoftMF: A Software Defined Moving Fingerprinting Framework for Proactive Security Policies Enforcement

Abstract

Networks such as in campuses and enterprises are suffering enormous attacks and threats. Traditional solutions are passive in nature, which lacks effective and speedy threat detection and mitigation abilities. This work combines flow watermarking with software-defined technology to propose a novel watermarking-based dynamic fingerprinting framework, called SoftMF (Software-defined Moving Fingerprinting), which introduces a watermark hopping mechanism integrated into edge switches and actively injects dynamic watermarks into network traffic. These dynamic watermarks are used as flows’ fingerprints for active security policy enforcement. SoftMF supports flexible and active defense strategies, such as access control, flow linking, stepping-stone detection and attack backtracking.