Mitigating TCP Protocol Misuse With Programmable Data Planes

This article proposes a new approach for detecting and mitigating the impact of misbehaving TCP end-hosts, specifically Optimistic ACK attack, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) abuse. In contrast to state-of-the-art, we show that it is possible mitigate such misbehavior leveraging emerging programmable data planes while not requiring any end-host or protocol modifications. A key challenge in doing so implement expressive, complex stateful functions plane within its restricted programming model. this regard, propose security monitoring function uses Extended Finite State Machine (EFSM) abstraction protocols plane. We also design mechanism mapping protocol's EFSM primitives. Our evaluation results demonstrate our can fully partially restore throughput loss caused by end-hosts manipulate congestion control through misinformation.