Detection of Misreporting Attacks on Software-Defined Immersive Environments

Abstract

The ability to centrally control network infrastructure using a programmable middleware has made Software-Defined Networking (SDN) ideal for emerging applications, such as immersive environments. However, such flexibility introduces new vulnerabilities, such as switch misreporting led load imbalance, which in turn make such immersive environment vulnerable to severe quality degradation. In this paper, we present a hybrid machine learning (ML)-based network anomaly detection framework that identifies such stealthy misreporting by capturing temporal inconsistencies in switch-reported loads, and thereby counter potentially catastrophic quality degradation of hosted immersive application. The detection system combines unsupervised anomaly scoring with supervised classification to robustly distinguish malicious behavior. Data collected from a realistic testbed deployment under both benign and adversarial conditions is used to train and evaluate the model. Experimental results show that the framework achieves high recall in detecting misreporting behavior, making it effective for early and reliable detection in SDN environments.