Software Synthesis for Networks

by Hossein Hojjat
Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies (TeIAS)

Bio
Hossein Hojjat is an assistant professor at the Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies (TeIAS) and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). He has held visiting assistant professorship at the Cornell University. He earned a PhD in Computer Science from EPFL under the supervision of Prof. Viktor Kuncak. He is on the editorial board of Information Processing Letters and also co-chairs the international conference on Fundamentals of Software Engineering (FSEN). His research interests center on program synthesis and verification.

Abstract
Software synthesis is a powerful technique that can dramatically increase the productivity of programmers by automating the construction of complex code. One area where synthesis seems particularly promising is in computer networks. Although Software-Defined Networking (SDN) makes it possible to build rich applications in software, programmers nowadays are forced to deal with numerous low-level details such as encoding high-level policies using low-level hardware primitives, dealing with unexpected failures, debugging a buggy network configurations, etc.

This talk will present highlights from recent work using synthesis to generate correct-by-construction network programs. In the first part of the talk, I will describe an approach for generating configuration updates that are guaranteed to preserve specified invariants. In the second part of the talk, I will present a technique based on Horn clause solving to help network operators fix buggy configurations.

(Joint work with Nate Foster and Eric Campbell (Cornell University), Pavol Cerny (Vienna University of Technology), Jedidiah McClurg (Colorado School of Mines), Philipp Ruemmer (Uppsala University)

More information