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p4v: practical verification for programmable data planes

Authors:

William Hallahan,

Cole Schlesinger,

Călin Caşcaval,

Nate FosterAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Pages 490 - 503

https://doi.org/10.1145/3230543.3230582

Published: 07 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We present the design and implementation of p4v, a practical tool for verifying data planes described using the P4 programming language. The design of p4v is based on classic verification techniques but adds several key innovations including a novel mechanism for incorporating assumptions about the control plane and domain-specific optimizations which are needed to scale to large programs. We present case studies showing that p4v verifies important properties and finds bugs in real-world programs. We conduct experiments to quantify the scalability of p4v on a wide range of additional examples. We show that with just a few hundred lines of control-plane annotations, p4v is able to verify critical safety properties for switch.p4, a program that implements the functionality of on a modern data center switch, in under three minutes.

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Index Terms

p4v: practical verification for programmable data planes
1. Networks
  1. Network architectures
    1. Programming interfaces
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods
        Software verification

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

August 2018

604 pages

ISBN:9781450355674

DOI:10.1145/3230543

General Chairs:
Sergey Gorinsky
IMDEA, Spain
,
János Tapolcai
BME, Hungary

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

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Published: 07 August 2018

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August 20 - 25, 2018

Budapest, Hungary

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https://doi.org/10.23919/IFIPNetworking62109.2024.10619865
Qiu YKon PBeckett RChen AWitchel EArpaci-Dusseau ARossbach CKeeton K(2024)Unearthing Semantic Checks for Cloud Infrastructure-as-Code ProgramsProceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 30th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles10.1145/3694715.3695974(574-589)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3694715.3695974
Campbell EHojjat HFoster N(2024)Computing Precise Control Interface SpecificationsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36897438:OOPSLA2(905-934)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
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Lu DTang BPaper MKogias M(2024)Towards Functional Verification of eBPF ProgramsProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions10.1145/3672197.3673435(37-43)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
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Alshnakat ALundberg DGuanciale RDam M(2024)HOL4P4: Mechanized Small-Step Semantics for P4Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36498198:OOPSLA1(223-249)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
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Kim JOkhravi HTian DUjcich B(2024)Security Challenges of Intent-Based NetworkingCommunications of the ACM10.1145/3639702Online publication date: 21-Jun-2024
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