[Pl-seminar] 11/16 Seminar: Arjun Guha, Programming Languages Meets Programmable Networks

[William J. Bowman]

NUPRL Seminar presents

Arjun Guha
U. Massachusetts, Amherst

Host: Jan Vitek
1:00pm
Monday, Nov. 16 2015
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Programming Languages Meets Programmable Networks

Abstract:
Computer networks do not simply connect machines together, but run several
applications on network devices, such as load balancers, intrusion detection
systems, authentication portals, and more. Historically, these applications were
black-boxes running on proprietary hardware, but software-defined networking
(SDN) now allows anyone to write their own programs using open networking
protocols (e.g., OpenFlow). So, what are the right abstractions for programming networks? This talk will try
to address this question in three ways.

First, we present a syntactic theory of network forwarding called
NetKAT, which supports equational reasoning about network-wide behavior.
Using NetKAT, programmers can ask and answer questions like, "Can A
communicate with B?", "Does all traffic traverse my intrusion detection
system?", "Is there a loop in my network?", and so on.

Second, we present a fast and efficient compiler for NetKAT. Although several
network compilers already exist, they are unusable on even moderately sized
networks. Using new data structures and compilation algorithms, our new compiler
is two orders of magnitudes faster than prior work and scales to large
datacenter networks.

Finally, we consider the problem of building a reliable runtime system for
NetKAT. NetKAT abstracts away several low-level details of networking hardware.
Although this is a boon for the network programmer, the burden now shifts to us
to engineer abstractions correctly. We present a Coq-certified runtime system
that is proven correct with respect to a detailed operational model software-
defined networks.

Bio:
Arjun Guha (https://people.cs.umass.edu/~arjun/home/) is an assistant
professor of Computer Science at UMass Amherst. He enjoys tackling
problems in systems using the tools and principles of programming
languages. Apart from network programming, he has worked on Web security
and system configuration languages. He received a PhD in Computer
Science from Brown University in 2012 and a BA in Computer Science from
Grinnell College in 2006.

-- 
William J. Bowman

Northeastern University
College of Computer and Information Science
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