Collaborative Research: FMitF: Track I: Specifying and Verifying Network-wide Properties of Dynamic Data Planes

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Computer networks connect users to bank accounts, online commerce, information about government, social media, and other cloud services. They are essential for modern business and everyday life. However, managing such networks is difficult and error-prone. As a result, damaging outages that have shut down everything from food deliveries to plane flights to critical information services occur all too frequently. This research project develops new technology for verification of a key component of modern computer networks---their data planes---which traditionally have been used just to forward traffic, but are increasingly used to implement complex network control logic and next-generation applications. The verification tools being developed will check network configurations both prior to deployment of those configurations, and also as those configurations execute, thereby making networks more reliable, and preventing many future outages before they can occur. This research project also provides educational opportunities for a diverse range of students, teaching them key skills in both networking and the application of formal verification methods. Spurred by the recent development of programmable network switches and programmable network interface cards (NICs), the data planes of industrial computer networks are becoming highly dynamic, allowing them not only to forward traffic but also to implement network control logic that can adjust to evolving network conditions. The goal of the proposed research is to make these new networks substantially more reliable via tools that can formally specify and verify network-wide behavior. These specifications use a common language of events to represent data plane activity (e.g., packet arrivals), control plane messages (e.g., routing announcements), and application layer events (e.g., installation of a cache entry) in a uniform way. The verification technology to validate these specifications uses a combination of static and dynamic techniques. Static verification catches bugs before network program changes are deployed, while dynamic verification, via monitors synthesized from high-level specifications, checks that static assumptions hold up, bridges scaling gaps, and provides defense in depth.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.