Saint FluidFaults, Who Made Programmable Networks Leak

Patron of software-defined networks, OpenFlow controllers, and libraries that won a prize and were then forgotten.

Life

In 2024 Nozomi Networks Labs revealed 37 vulnerabilities in libfluid_msg, the part of libfluid that parses OpenFlow messages. The library had won an Open Networking Foundation contest in 2013 and had since ended up inside SDN products, including an appliance from a well-known vendor. A single malformed OpenFlow packet could bring down controllers and switches; when the research was published, no official patch existed.

Prayer

O Saint FluidFaults, who makes the most trusting parsers overflow, let our controllers at least check the lengths. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by keeping OpenFlow nodes away from untrusted networks and fixing yourself the code the original project never will.

Prize-winning code, flooded node.