Attacks against Network Functions Virtualization and Software-Defined Networking: State-of-the-art

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are two emerging paradigms for networks. While being independent from each other, they may be deployed together, which is likely to happen more frequently in the future, as they bring many opportunities for simpler, more flexible and energy-efficient networks. However, they also come with weaknesses that evil-minded users could exploit to disrupt such architectures. In this paper, we survey attacks that have been or could be performed against NFV and SDN, and propose practical countermeasures when applicable.