Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Programming Protocol-Independent Packet Processors

P4 is a high-level language for programming protocol-independent packet processors. P4 works in conjunction with SDN control protocols like OpenFlow. In its current form, OpenFlow explicitly specifies protocol headers on which it operates. This set has grown from 12 to 41 fields in a few years, increasing the complexity of the specification while still not providing the flexibility to add new headers. In this paper we propose P4 as a strawman proposal for how OpenFlow should evolve in the future. We have three goals: (1) Reconfigurability in the field: Programmers should be able to change the way switches process packets once they are deployed. (2) Protocol independence: Switches should not be tied to any specific network protocols. (3) Target independence: Programmers should be able to describe packet-processing functionality independently of the specifics of the underlying hardware. As an example, we describe how to use P4 to configure a switch to add a new hierarchical label

ReasoNet:Inferring Network Policies Using Ontologies

Modern SDN control stacks consist of multiple abstraction and virtualization layers to enable flexibility in the development of new control features. Rich data modeling frameworks are essential when sharing information across control layers. Unfortunately, existing NOS data modeling capabilities are limited to simple type-checking and code templating. We present an exploration of a more extreme point on SDN data modeling: ReasoNet. Developers can use semantic web technologies to enrich their data models with reasoning rules and integrity/consistency constraints and automate state inference across layers. We demonstrate the ability of ReasoNet to automate state verification and cross-layer debugging, through the implementation of two popular control applications, a learning switch and a QoS policy engine

Software Defined Based Pure VPN Protocol for Preventing IP Spoofing Attacks in IOT

The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of devices, vehicles, and home appliances that contain electronics, software, actuators, and connectivity which allows these things to connect, interact and exchange data. IoT involves extending Internet connectivity beyond standard devices, such as desktops, laptops, smart phones and tablets, to any range of traditionally dumb or non-internet-enabled physical devices and everyday objects. Embedded with technology, these devices can communicate and interact over the Internet, and they can be remotely monitored and controlled. Traditionally, current internet packet delivery only depends on packet destination IP address and forward devices neglect the validation of packet’s IP source address. It makes attacks can leverage this flow to launch attacks with forge IP source address so as to meet their violent purpose and avoid to be tracked. In order to reduce this threat and enhance internet accountability, many solution proposed in the inter domain and intra domain aspects. Furthermore, most of them faced with some issues hard to cope, i.e., data security, data privacy. And most importantly code cover PureVPN protocol for both inter and intra domain areas. The novel network architecture of SDN possess whole network PureVPN protocol rule instead of traditional SDN switches, which brings good opportunity to solve IP spoofing problems. However, use authentication based on key exchange between the machines on your network; something like IP Security protocol will significantly cut down on the risk of spoofing. This paper proposes a SDN based PureVPN protocol architecture, which can cover both inter and intra domain areas with encrypted format effectively than SDN devices. The PureVPN protocol scheme is significant in improving the security and privacy in SDN for IoT

A techno-economic study of optical network disaggregation employing Open-Source Software business models for Metropolitan Area Networks

This work provides a techno-economic evaluation of optical disaggregation architectures in the context of metropolitan area networks. The study compares two optical disaggregation options (partial vs. total) against the legacy benchmark where optical equipment is subject to vendor lock-in, as it is deployed in most networks today. We show that emerging open source software projects within the software-defined networking ecosystem can potentially yield significant cost savings for medium- and large-size network operators, while they can introduce extra flexibility and agility to network operations and service deployments.This work has been supported by EU H2020 project Metro-Haul, grant no. 761727 (https://metro-haul.eu)