NEAt: Network Error Auto-Correct, with Bingzhe Liu

Bingzhe Liu is a first-year PhD student at University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. In this episode, we discuss the paper “NEAt:
Network Error Auto-Correct,” by Wenxuan Zhou, Jason Croft, Bingzhe
Liu, and Matthew Caesar, which Bingzhe presented on April 4 at SOSR,
the Symposium on SDN Research. The abstract for this paper is:

Configuring and maintaining an enterprise network is a challenging and
error-prone process. Administrators must often consider security
policies from a variety of sources simultaneously, including regulatory
requirements, industry standards, and to mitigate attack vectors.
Erroneous implementation of a policy, however, can result in costly
data breaches and intrusions. Relying on humans to discover and
troubleshoot violations is slow and prone to error, considering the
speed at which new attack vectors propagate and the increasing network
dynamics, partly an effect of SDN. To ensure the network is always in a
state consistent with the desired policies, administrators need
frameworks to automatically diagnose and repair violations in
real-time.

To address this problem, we present NEAt, a system analogous to a
smartphone’s autocorrect feature that enables on-the-fly repair to
policy-violating updates. NEAt modifies the forwarding behavior of
updates to automatically repair violations of properties such as
reachability, service chaining, and segmentation. NEAt sits between an
SDN controller and the forwarding devices, and intercepts updates
proposed by SDN applications. If an update violates the policy defined
by an administrator, such as reachability or segmentation, NEAt
transforms the update into one that complies with the policy. Unlike
domain-specific languages or synthesis platforms, NEAt allows
enterprise networks to leverage the advanced functionality of SDN
applications while simultaneously achieving strong, automated
enforcement of general policies.

The paper has contact information for its authors.

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