Building bug-tolerant routers with virtualization

Matthew Caesar, Jennifer L. Rexford

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

Implementation bugs are a highly critical problem in wide-area networks. The software running on core routers is subject to vulnerabilities, coding mistakes, and misconfiguration. Unfortunately, these problems are often found after deployment in live networks, where they lead to outages, make networks prone to attack, and involve a challenging process to localize and debug. In this work, we propose a bug-tolerant router that runs multiple diverse copies of router software in parallel, such that each copy is unlikely to fail at the same time as the others. Diversity is achieved by varying the ordering and timing of routing messages, running different routing protocols, running code written by different implementers, etc. Because each copy is different, each copy will likely have a different output during an error, and hence a simple voting procedure is then used to decide which copy's output will drive packet forwarding and control-plane communication with other routers. In this paper we motivate our design, describe some design decisions and tradeoffs, and then conclude with a description of our ongoing work in building a prototype of this architecture.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2008 Conference and the Co-located Workshops - PRESTO'08
Subtitle of host publicationProceedings of the ACM Workshop on Programmable Routers for Extensible Services of Tomorrow
Pages51-56
Number of pages6
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2008
EventSIGCOMM 2008 Conference and the Co-located Workshops - PRESTO'08: ACM Workshop on Programmable Routers for Extensible Services of Tomorrow - Seattle, WA, United States
Duration: Aug 22 2008Aug 22 2008

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2008 Conference and the Co-located Workshops - PRESTO'08: Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Programmable Routers for Extensible Services of Tomorrow

Other

OtherSIGCOMM 2008 Conference and the Co-located Workshops - PRESTO'08: ACM Workshop on Programmable Routers for Extensible Services of Tomorrow
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle, WA
Period8/22/088/22/08

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture

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