A Verification Platform for SDN-Enabled Applications

Abstract

Recent work on integration of SDNs with application-layer systems like Hadoop has created a class of system, SDN-Enabled Applications, which implement application-specific functionality on the network layer by exposing network monitoring and control semantics to application developers. This requires domain-specific knowledge to correctly reason about network behavior and properties, as the SDN is now tightly coupled to the larger system. Existing tools for SDN verification and analysis are insufficiently expressive to capture this composition of network and domain models. Unfortunately, it is exactly this kind of automated reasoning and verification that is necessary to develop robust SDN-enabled applications for real-world systems. In this paper, we present ongoing work on Verificare, a verification platform being built to enable formal verification of SDNs as components of a larger domain-specific system. SLA, safety, and security requirements can selected from a variety of formal libraries and automatically verified using a variety of off-the-shelf tools. This approach not only extends the flexibility of existing SDN verification systems, but can actually provide more fine-grained analysis of possible network states due to extra information supplied by the domain model.