Recent trends in software-defined networking have extended network programmability to the data plane through programming languages such as P4. Unfortunately, the chance of introducing bugs in the network also increases significantly in this new context. Existing data plane verification approaches are unable to model P4 programs, or they present severe restrictions in the set of properties that can be modeled. In this paper, we introduce a data plane program verification approach based on assertion checking and symbolic execution. Network programmers annotate P4 programs with assertions expressing general security and correctness properties. Once annotated, these programs are transformed into C-based models and all their possible paths are symbolically executed. Results show that the proposed approach, called ASSERT-P4, can uncover a broad range of bugs and software flaws. Furthermore, experimental evaluation shows that it takes less than a minute for verifying various P4 applications proposed in the literature.
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Verification of P4 Programs in Feasible Time Using Assertions
Recent trends in software-defined networking have extended network programmability to the data plane. Unfortunately, the chance of introducing bugs increases significantly. Verification can help prevent bugs by assuring that the program does not violate its requirements. Although research on the verification of P4 programs is very active, we still need tools to make easier for programmers to express properties and to rapidly verify complex invariants. In this paper, we leverage assertions and symbolic execution to propose a more general P4 verification approach. Developers annotate P4 programs with assertions expressing general network correctness properties; the result is transformed into C models and all possible paths symbolically executed. We implement a prototype, and use it to show the feasibility of the verification approach. Because symbolic execution does not scale well, we investigate a set of techniques to speed up the process for the specific case of P4 programs. We use the prototype implemented to show the gains provided by three speed up techniques (use of constraints, program slicing, parallelization), and experiment with different compiler optimization choices. We show our tool can uncover a broad range of bugs, and can do it in less than a minute considering various P4 applications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1740911
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10107644
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 73 to 85
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3281411.3281421
