An assertion language for debugging SDN applications

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides opportunities for network verification and debugging by offering centralized visibility of the data plane. This has enabled both offline and online data-plane verification. However, little work has gone into the verification of time-varying properties (e.g., dynamic access control), where verification conditions change dynamically in response to application logic, network events, and external stimulus (e.g., operator requests). This paper introduces an assertion language to support verifying and debugging SDN applications with dynamically changing verification conditions. The language allows programmers to annotate controller applications with C-style assertions about the data plane. Assertions consist of regular expressions on paths to describe path properties for classes of packets, and universal and existential quantifiers that range over programmer-defined sets of hosts, switches, or other network entities. As controller programs dynamically add and remove elements from these sets, they generate new verification conditions that the existing data plane must satisfy. This work proposes an incremental data structure together with an underlying verification engine, to avoid naively re-verifying the entire data plane as these verification conditions change. To validate our ideas, we have implemented a debugging library on top of a modified version of VeriFlow, which is easily integrated into existing controller systems with minimal changes. Using this library, we have verified correctness properties for applications on several controller platforms.