SDN switches aren’t hard to compromise, researcher says

Software-defined switches hold a lot of promise for network operators, but new research due to be presented at Black Hat will show that security measures haven’t quite caught up yet.

Gregory Pickett, founder of the Chicago-based security firm Hellfire Security, has developed several attacks against network switches that use Onie (the Open Network Install Environment).

Onie is a small, Linux based operating system that runs on a bare-metal switch. A network operating system is installed on top of Onie, which is designed to make it easy and fast for the OS to be swapped with a different one.

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