Katerina Argyraki and Mihai Dobrescu receive Best Paper award
© 2014 EPFL
Mihai Dobrescu, a PhD student at the Network Architecture Lab (NAL), and Prof. Katerina Argyraki, who leads the lab, received Best Paper award at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2014) for their paper Software Dataplane Verificiation. The NSDI conference solicits papers describing original research that furthers the knowledge and understanding of the networking and systems community as a whole, advances significant research dialogue, or pushes the architectural boundaries of large-scale network services.
Software dataplanes are emerging as an alternative to traditional hardware switches and routers, promising programmability and short time to market. These advantages are set against the risk of disrupting the network with bugs, unpredictable performance, or security vulnerabilities. We explore the feasibility of verifying software dataplanes to ensure smooth network operation. For general programs, verifiability and performance are competing goals; we argue that software dataplanes are different — we can write them in a way that enables verification and preserves performance. We present a verification tool that takes as input a software dataplane, written in a way that meets a given set of conditions, and (dis)proves that the dataplane satisfies crash-freedom, bounded-execution, and filtering properties. We evaluate our tool on stateless and simple stateful Click pipelines; we perform complete and sound verification of these pipelines within tens of minutes, whereas a state-of-the art general-purpose tool fails to complete the same task within several hours.
Research at the Network Architecture Lab (NAL) focuses on fundamental questions regarding the design and construction of practical and dependable network systems. The functionality deployed inside the network infrastructure, (e.g. inside Internet routers, data-center switches, or intermediate nodes in a sensor network) is the core interest.The main goal is to identify and build the right network layer for different communication architectures.