7,705 research outputs found
Diagnose network failures via data-plane analysis
Diagnosing problems in networks is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Previous tools to assist operators primarily focus on analyzing control
plane configuration. Configuration analysis is limited in that it cannot find
bugs in router software, and is harder to generalize across protocols since it
must model complex configuration languages and dynamic protocol behavior.
This paper studies an alternate approach: diagnosing problems through
static analysis of the data plane. This approach can catch bugs that are
invisible at the level of configuration files, and simplifies unified analysis of a
network across many protocols and implementations. We present Anteater, a
tool for checking invariants in the data plane. Anteater translates high-level
network invariants into boolean satisfiability problems, checks them against
network state using a SAT solver, and reports counterexamples if violations
have been found. Applied to a large campus network, Anteater revealed 23
bugs, including forwarding loops and stale ACL rules, with only five false
positives. Nine of these faults are being fixed by campus network operators
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