ing WS1S Systems to Verify Parameterized Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 Kai Baukus, Saddek Bensalem, Yassine Lakhnech and Karsten Stahl FMona: A Tool for Expressing Validation Techniques over Infinite State Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 J.-P. Bodeveix and M. Filali Transitive Closures of Regular Relations for Verifying Infinite-State Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Bengt Jonsson and Marcus Nilsson Diagnostic and Test Generation Using Static Analysis to Improve Automatic Test Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Marius Bozga, Jean-Claude Fernandez and Lucian Ghirvu Efficient Diagnostic Generation for Boolean Equation Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Radu Mateescu Efficient Model-Checking Compositional State Space Generation with Partial Order Reductions for Asynchronous Communicating Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Jean-Pierre Krimm and Laurent Mounier Checking for CFFD-Preorder with Tester Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 Juhana Helovuo and Antti Valmari Fair Bisimulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Thomas A. Henzinger and Sriram K. Rajamani Integrating Low Level Symmetries into Reachability Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Karsten Schmidt Model-Checking Tools Model Checking Support for the ASM High-Level Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Giuseppe Del Castillo and Kirsten Winter Table of

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems. Proc. TACAS 2009

Computer networks lack a general control paradigm, as traditional networks do not provide any network-wide management abstractions. As a result, each new function (such as routing) must provide its own state distribution, element discovery, and failure recovery mechanisms. We believe this lack of a common control platform has significantly hindered the development of flexible, reliable and feature-rich network control planes.To address this, we present Onix, a platform on top of which a network control plane can be implemented as a distributed system. Control planes written within Onix operate on a global view of the network, and use basic state distribution primitives provided by the platform. Thus Onix provides a general API for control plane implementations, while allowing them to make their own trade-offs among consistency, durability, and scalability.

/pdf/onix-a-distributed-control-platform-for-large-scale-2nyb613mj2.pdf

Onix: a distributed control platform for large-scale production networks

http://rboutaba.cs.uwaterloo.ca/Papers/Journals/2010/Mosharaf10.pdf

A survey of network virtualization

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) flooding attacks are one of the biggest concerns for security professionals. DDoS flooding attacks are typically explicit attempts to disrupt legitimate users' access to services. Attackers usually gain access to a large number of computers by exploiting their vulnerabilities to set up attack armies (i.e., Botnets). Once an attack army has been set up, an attacker can invoke a coordinated, large-scale attack against one or more targets. Developing a comprehensive defense mechanism against identified and anticipated DDoS flooding attacks is a desired goal of the intrusion detection and prevention research community. However, the development of such a mechanism requires a comprehensive understanding of the problem and the techniques that have been used thus far in preventing, detecting, and responding to various DDoS flooding attacks. In this paper, we explore the scope of the DDoS flooding attack problem and attempts to combat it. We categorize the DDoS flooding attacks and classify existing countermeasures based on where and when they prevent, detect, and respond to the DDoS flooding attacks. Moreover, we highlight the need for a comprehensive distributed and collaborative defense approach. Our primary intention for this work is to stimulate the research community into developing creative, effective, efficient, and comprehensive prevention, detection, and response mechanisms that address the DDoS flooding problem before, during and after an actual attack.

/pdf/a-survey-of-defense-mechanisms-against-distributed-denial-of-36i5dbdzy6.pdf

A Survey of Defense Mechanisms Against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Flooding Attacks

OpenFlow is a great concept, but its original design imposes excessive overheads. It can simplify network and traffic management in enterprise and data center environments, because it enables flow-level control over Ethernet switching and provides global visibility of the flows in the network. However, such fine-grained control and visibility comes with costs: the switch-implementation costs of involving the switch's control-plane too often and the distributed-system costs of involving the OpenFlow controller too frequently, both on flow setups and especially for statistics-gathering.In this paper, we analyze these overheads, and show that OpenFlow's current design cannot meet the needs of high-performance networks. We design and evaluate DevoFlow, a modification of the OpenFlow model which gently breaks the coupling between control and global visibility, in a way that maintains a useful amount of visibility without imposing unnecessary costs. We evaluate DevoFlow through simulations, and find that it can load-balance data center traffic as well as fine-grained solutions, without as much overhead: DevoFlow uses 10--53 times fewer flow table entries at an average switch, and uses 10--42 times fewer control messages.

/pdf/devoflow-scaling-flow-management-for-high-performance-2ozfw48yhd.pdf

DevoFlow: scaling flow management for high-performance networks

We revisit the problem of scaling software routers, motivated by recent advances in server technology that enable high-speed parallel processing--a feature router workloads appear ideally suited to exploit. We propose a software router architecture that parallelizes router functionality both across multiple servers and across multiple cores within a single server. By carefully exploiting parallelism at every opportunity, we demonstrate a 35Gbps parallel router prototype; this router capacity can be linearly scaled through the use of additional servers. Our prototype router is fully programmable using the familiar Click/Linux environment and is built entirely from off-the-shelf, general-purpose server hardware.

/pdf/routebricks-exploiting-parallelism-to-scale-software-routers-33j7k9nkx4.pdf

RouteBricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers

This paper describes Active Internet Traffic Filtering (AITF), a mechanism for blocking highly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks are an acute contemporary problem, with few practical solutions available today; we describe in this paper the reasons why no effective DDoS filtering mechanism has been deployed yet. We show that the current Internet's routers have sufficient filtering resources to thwart such attacks, with the condition that attack traffic be blocked close to its sources; AITF leverages this observation. Our results demonstrate that AITF can block a million-flow attack within seconds, while it requires only tens of thousands of wire-speed filters per participating router -- an amount easily accommodated by today's routers. AITF can be deployed incrementally and yields benefits even to the very first adopters.

/pdf/active-internet-traffic-filtering-real-time-response-to-gnumpvgacj.pdf

Active internet traffic filtering: real-time response to denial-of-service attacks

To become a credible alternative to specialized hardware, general-purpose networking needs to offer not only flexibility, but also predictable performance. Recent projects have demonstrated that general-purpose multicore hard-ware is capable of high-performance packet processing, but under a crucial simplifying assumption of uniformity: all processing cores see the same type/amount of traffic and run identical code, while all packets incur the same type of conventional processing (e.g., IP forwarding). Instead, we present a general-purpose packet-processing system that combines ease of programmability with predictable performance, while running a diverse set of applications and serving multiple clients with different needs. Offering predictability in this context is considered a hard problem because software processes contend for shared hardware resources--caches, memory controllers, buses--in unpredictable ways. Still, we show that, in our system, (a) the way in which resource contention affects performance is predictable and (b) the overall performance depends little on how different processes are scheduled on different cores. To the best of our knowledge, our results constitute the first evidence that, when designing software network equipment, flexibility and predictability are not mutually exclusive goals.

/pdf/toward-predictable-performance-in-software-packet-processing-1dnbvsdfb6.pdf

Toward predictable performance in software packet-processing platforms

Network Function Virtualization is allowing carriers to replace dedicated middleboxes with Network Functions (NFs) consolidated on shared servers, but the question of how (and even whether) one can achieve performance SLOs with software packet processing remains open. A key challenge is the high variability and unpredictability in throughput and latency introduced when NFs are consolidated. We show that, using processor cache isolation and with careful sizing of I/O buffers, we can directly enforce a high degree of performance isolation among consolidated NFs - for a wide range of NFs, our technique caps the maximum throughput degradation to 2.9% (compared to 44.3%), and the 95th percentile latency degradation to 2.5% (compared to 24.5%). Building on this, we present ResQ, a resource manager for NFV that enforces performance SLOs for multi-tenant NFV clusters in a resource efficient manner. ResQ achieves 60%-236% better resource efficiency for enforcing SLOs that contain contention-sensitive NFs compared to previous work.

/pdf/resq-enabling-slos-in-network-function-virtualization-dbx4iev18h.pdf

ResQ: enabling SLOs in network function virtualization

Designing a communication protocol for sensor networks often involves obtaining the right trade-off between energy efficiency and end-to-end packet error rate. In this article, we show that network coding provides a means to elegantly balance these two goals. We present the design and implementation of SenseCode, a collection protocol for sensor networks—and, to the best of our knowledge, the first such implemented protocol to employ network coding. SenseCode provides a way to gracefully introduce a configurable amount of redundant information into the network, thereby decreasing end-to-end packet error rate in the face of packet loss. We compare SenseCode to the best (to our knowledge) existing alternative and show that it reduces end-to-end packet error rate in highly dynamic environments, while consuming a comparable amount of network resources. We have implemented SenseCode as a TinyOS module and evaluate it through extensive TOSSIM simulations.

Katerina Argyraki

Papers

RouteBricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers

Active internet traffic filtering: real-time response to denial-of-service attacks

Toward predictable performance in software packet-processing platforms

ResQ: enabling SLOs in network function virtualization

SenseCode: Network coding for reliable sensor networks