Incremental Network Configuration Verification

Abstract

Network configurations are constantly changing, and each change poses a risk of catastrophic network outages. Consequently, the networking community has put significant effort into developing and optimizing configuration verifiers. However, we observe existing configuration verifiers still have a significant drawback: they are not optimized for configuration *changes*. That is, they always check a snapshot of network configuration from scratch, even though the configuration often changes slightly since the last verification. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of *incremental network configuration verification (INCV)*. We also demonstrate the feasibility of INCV by introducing RealConfig, an incremental configuration verifier that can check configuration changes within one second.

@inproceedings{zhang2020incremental,
  title={Incremental network configuration verification},
  author={Zhang, Peng and Huang, Yuhao and Gember-Jacobson, Aaron and Shi, Wenbo and Liu, Xu and Yang, Hongkun and Zuo, Zhiqiang},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 19th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks},
  pages={81--87},
  year={2020}
}