Research Summaries

Back A New Approach to Dataplane Software

Fiscal Year 2020
Division Graduate School of Operational & Information Sciences
Department Computer Science
Investigator(s) Volpano, Dennis M.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary Open networking initiatives have allowed networking software to be developed faster and at much lower cost than in the past. These initiatives include development of very high-level programming paradigms for both network data and control planes. Consequently very complex (virtual) planes can be quickly deployed. But our ability to quickly guarantee in a rigorous way that these planes will behave as expected has not kept pace. We are essentially producing more powerful techniques to deliver untrustworthy code. This is the wrong trend for the U.S. Navy where eliminating vulnerabilities is as important as reducing cost. This project aims to reverse this trend for the dataplane. The dataplane alone can be very complex due to timers, caches, traffic history and different types of traffic handled there. We propose to develop techniques to rapidly build dataplane software in a way that can be verified by developers themselves quickly without the need for special-purpose verifiers, model checkers or theorem provers. These techniques will allow more robust software to be rapidly produced than is possible using current technologies.
Keywords Cyber Security Networking Software
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal