Bingzhe Liu is a first-year PhD student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In this episode, we discuss the paper “NEAt:

Network Error Auto-Correct,” by Wenxuan Zhou, Jason Croft, Bingzhe Liu, and Matthew Caesar, which Bingzhe presented on April 4 at SOSR, the Symposium on SDN Research. The abstract for this paper is:

Configuring and maintaining an enterprise network is a challenging and

error-prone process. Administrators must often consider security

policies from a variety of sources simultaneously, including regulatory

requirements, industry standards, and to mitigate attack vectors.

Erroneous implementation of a policy, however, can result in costly

data breaches and intrusions. Relying on humans to discover and

troubleshoot violations is slow and prone to error, considering the

speed at which new attack vectors propagate and the increasing network

dynamics, partly an effect of SDN. To ensure the network is always in a

state consistent with the desired policies, administrators need

frameworks to automatically diagnose and repair violations in

real-time.

To address this problem, we present NEAt, a system analogous to a

smartphone’s autocorrect feature that enables on-the-fly repair to

policy-violating updates. NEAt modifies the forwarding behavior of

updates to automatically repair violations of properties such as

reachability, service chaining, and segmentation. NEAt sits between an

SDN controller and the forwarding devices, and intercepts updates

proposed by SDN applications. If an update violates the policy defined

by an administrator, such as reachability or segmentation, NEAt

transforms the update into one that complies with the policy. Unlike

domain-specific languages or synthesis platforms, NEAt allows

enterprise networks to leverage the advanced functionality of SDN

applications while simultaneously achieving strong, automated

enforcement of general policies.

The paper has contact information for its authors.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space

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