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Testing stateful and dynamic data planes with FlowTest

Published: 22 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Many recent efforts have leveraged Software-Defined Networking (SDN capabilities to enable new and more efficient ways of testing the correctness of a network's forwarding behaviors. However, realistic network settings induce two additional sources of complexity that fall outside the scope of existing SDN testing frameworks: (1) complex nature of real-world data planes (e.g., stateful firewalls, dynamic behaviors of proxy caches), and (2) complexity of intended network policies (e.g., service chaining). In this paper, we outline FlowTest, a high-level vision for testing such stateful and dynamic network policies. FlowTest systematically explores the state space of the network data plane to verify its behavior w.r.t. policy goals. We show the early promise of our approach and discuss open challenges in realizing this vision in practice.

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  • (2022)Formal Verification and Testing of Data Plane in Software-Defined Networks: A SurveyAdvances in Artificial Intelligence and Security10.1007/978-3-031-06764-8_11(134-144)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HotSDN '14: Proceedings of the third workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking
    August 2014
    252 pages
    ISBN:9781450329897
    DOI:10.1145/2620728
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    Publication History

    Published: 22 August 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. network test
    2. policy enforcement
    3. stateful data plane

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    • Research-article

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    SIGCOMM'14
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    SIGCOMM'14: ACM SIGCOMM 2014 Conference
    August 22, 2014
    Illinois, Chicago, USA

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    HotSDN '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 50 of 114 submissions, 44%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 198 submissions, 44%

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    Cited By

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    • (2022)Formal Verification and Testing of Data Plane in Software-Defined Networks: A SurveyAdvances in Artificial Intelligence and Security10.1007/978-3-031-06764-8_11(134-144)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2022
    • (2021)A Survey on the Verification of Adversarial Data Planes in Software-Defined NetworksProceedings of the 2021 ACM International Workshop on Software Defined Networks & Network Function Virtualization Security10.1145/3445968.3452092(3-10)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2021
    • (2020)P4Consist: Toward Consistent P4 SDNsIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2020.299965338:7(1293-1307)Online publication date: Jul-2020
    • (2019)ShadeNF: Testing Online Network Functions2019 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)10.1109/IC2E.2019.00027(128-138)Online publication date: Jun-2019
    • (2019)Fault Management in Software-Defined Networking: A SurveyIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.286892221:1(349-392)Online publication date: Sep-2020
    • (2019)A Survey on Network Verification and Testing With Formal Methods: Approaches and ChallengesIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.286805021:1(940-969)Online publication date: Sep-2020
    • (2018)Are We Ready to Drive Software-Defined Networks? A Comprehensive Survey on Management Tools and TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/316529051:2(1-35)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2018
    • (2017)Delta-netProceedings of the 14th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3154630.3154689(735-749)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2017
    • (2017)Supporting Diverse Dynamic Intent-based Policies using JanusProceedings of the 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3143361.3143380(296-309)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2017
    • (2017)Automated verification of security chains in software-defined networks with synaptic2017 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)10.1109/NETSOFT.2017.8004195(1-9)Online publication date: Jul-2017
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