An SDN firewall to prevent ARP and DDoS attacks

The basic idea here is to prevent ARP and DDoS attacks in the simulated topologies (using Mininet).

Note: This project was done on an Ubuntu VM with mininet, pox and ryu manually installed. In case something doesn't work on your system, please try to update the packages to the lastest version, or use an Ubuntu VM like me. The script to install mininet and other components is install.sh, and install-ryu.sh to install ryu (in ./bin/).

This is how to run the project:

• Symlink (ln -s) l3.py and detection.py from ./ddos/ into $HOME/pox/pox/forwarding. It is important that the path remains the same (and it will be if you are using a mininet VM or manually run the mininet install script from their website on an Ubuntu VM).
  • In case you have manually changed the path to something else, go through run.sh in ./bin/ and modify the correct variable. You're also welcome to open an issue, but no guarantees.
• You're basically set at this point. Head over to ./bin/ and run ./run.sh. By default, it will show a small help message if you run it without any flags. Read the message and try again (which also includes a description of all the flags available, can also be invoked with ./run.sh -h).
  • For your convenience, the -a flag enables components related to ARP, and -d does the same for DDoS.
  • The flag -t is to run the topology, and the -c flag is to run the remote controller for either scenario.
  • Thus, to run the ARP topology, run ./run.sh -at. To run the DDoS controller, run ./run.sh -dc. And so on.
    • Take care to read the prompts, as they will change how the topology and the attacks operate (i.e. if the firewall works, attacks don't work and vice-versa).
  • The -C flag is for comments related to the demonstration of a certain attack. Use it with an "attack flag". I.e. -aC will show comments for an ARP attack. -dC for DDoS.

This work is not completely original. However, I have ironed out some kinks, and the project is confirmed to be working with python 3.8 as of 2022-03-15.