1. Switches are Monitors Too!
- Author
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Rodrigo Fonseca, Timothy Adam Hoff, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Nicholas DeMarinis, and Tim Nelson
- Subjects
Stateless protocol ,Correctness ,business.industry ,Computer science ,Property (programming) ,Network packet ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Distributed computing ,020206 networking & telecommunications ,0102 computer and information sciences ,02 engineering and technology ,01 natural sciences ,Instruction set ,Debugging ,Stateful firewall ,010201 computation theory & mathematics ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,State (computer science) ,business ,Computer network ,media_common - Abstract
Testing and debugging networks /in situ/ is notoriously difficult. Many vital correctness properties involve histories over multiple packets (e.g., prior established connections). Checking such properties requires /cross-packet state/, which cannot be fully captured on stateless switch hardware.Recent SDN work is enabling limited switch operations on persistent state. We present runtime checking of cross-packet correctness properties as a unique and instructive use case for developing stateful switch primitives. In this paper, we examine a set of cross-packet properties and distill from them switch features needed to monitor their correctness. We then contrast these against features provided by current approaches to switch state in SDNs and identify semantic gaps with an eye toward informing future switch instruction sets.
- Published
- 2016
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