AitF: Collaborative Research: Foundations of Intent-based Networking

计算机网络在企业、组织和政府的日常运营中发挥着至关重要的作用：它们促进了对服务和信息的访问，并有助于抵御某些类型的网络攻击。 不幸的是，当前的网络需要高技能的网络运营商提供网络应该如何表现的详细规范。 这是一个繁琐且容易出错的过程，限制了网络为满足新兴业务需求而进行演进的容易程度，并为可能对网络可用性、性能和安全性产生重大影响的细微错误打开了大门。 该项目的目标是自动生成网络硬件所需的详细规范，这些规范来自一组由可能具有有限网络背景的个人指定的高级安全和性能目标。 换句话说，这个项目旨在让管理员专注于网络应该做什么，而不是如何实现。 该项目的更广泛影响是为提高网络稳定性和安全性铺平道路，自动生成满足一组高级策略和目标的网络配置（统称“意图”）需要网络管理员正式指定其意图的语言，以及生成最佳和正确配置的机制，各种网络硬件。 为了满足这些要求，PI计划探索如何将程序合成技术应用于网络配置并扩展到网络配置。 该项目将导致合成技术的设计，用于生成特定类型的意图实现（例如，传统的控制平面配置），以及对所选择的合成算法引入特定领域的改进以确保合成所需的时间是实际的并且所得到的数据和控制平面是最佳的（例如，配置具有最小的复杂性）。 本研究所产生的算法将推进程序综合的艺术状态，并提供新的见解如何将程序综合应用到其他领域。

Computer networks play an essential role in the day-to-day operations of businesses, organizations, and governments: they facilitate access to services and information as well as help protect against some types of cyberattacks. Unfortunately, current networks require highly-skilled network operators to provide detailed specifications of how the network should behave. This is a tedious and error prone process that limits how easily a network can evolve to meet emerging business needs and opens the door for subtle errors that can have a drastic impact on network availability, performance, and security. The goal of this project is to automatically produce the detailed specifications required by networking hardware from a set of high-level security and performance objectives specified by individuals who may have limited networking background. In other words, this project aims to allow administrators to focus on what the network should do rather than how it should be achieved. The broader impact of this project is to pave the way for increased network stability and security, and also to aid in training the next generation of network professionals.Automatically producing network configurations that satisfy a set of high-level policies and objectives (collectively referred to as "intent") requires both a language for network administrators to formally specify their intents and a mechanism for generating optimal and correct configurations for various types of networking hardware. To satisfy these requirements, the PIs plan to explore how program synthesis techniques can be applied and extended to network configurations. The project will lead to the design of synthesis techniques for generating specific types of intent implementations (e.g., traditional control plane configurations), as well as introduce domain-specific refinements to the chosen synthesis algorithms to ensure the time required for synthesis is practical and the resulting data and control planes are optimal (e.g., the configurations have minimal complexity). The algorithms produced by this research will advance the state of the art of program synthesis and provide new insights into how to apply program synthesis to other domains.