Abstract
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a recent networking paradigm that has become increasingly popular in the last decade. It gives unprecedented control over the global behavior of the network and provides a new opportunity for formal methods. Much work has appeared in the last few years on providing bridges between SDN and verification. This paper advances this research line and provides a link between SDN and traditional work on formal methods for verification of distributed software—actor-based modelling. We show how SDN programs can be seamlessly modelled using actors, and thus existing advanced model checking techniques developed for actors can be directly applied to verify a range of properties of SDN networks, including consistency of flow tables, violation of safety policies, and forwarding loops.
This work was partially funded by the Spanish MECD Salvador de Madariaga Mobility Grants PRX17/00297 and PRX17/00303, the Spanish MINECO projects TIN2015–69175-C4-2-R, TIN2015-69175-C4-3-R, and he CM project S2013/ICE-3006, the ERC starting grant Profoundnet (679127) and a Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2016-129).
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Albert, E., Gómez-Zamalloa, M., Rubio, A., Sammartino, M., Silva, A. (2018). SDN-Actors: Modeling and Verification of SDN Programs. In: Havelund, K., Peleska, J., Roscoe, B., de Vink, E. (eds) Formal Methods. FM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10951. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95582-7_33
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