Can we exploit buggy P4 programs?

Abstract

Recent verification works have found numerous bugs in P4 programs. While it is obvious bugs are undesirable, it is currently not known what effects these bugs have in practice? In this paper we take a first look at the potential of exploitation for such bugs: we first examine how three different targets behave when unspecified behaviours are triggered, finding a range of potentially exploitable behaviours; we use these to attack two concrete programs. We find that the security impact of such exploits can be high, but that the severity of the attack depends on the target.