Abstract: When Facebook/X is down for several hours, it affects our social life. Beyond interaction, the Internet matters greatly as more commerce is electronic (19 trillion per year). I will describe steps we have taken towards creating a new field, Network Design Automation (NDA). NDA seeks to create computer-aided design (CAD) tools for designing and managing networks to reduce design effort and increase reliability. A common meme is “If the Internet is down it’s always DNS, except if it's BGP”. For context, DNS is the protocol used in the Internet to translate domain names like cnn.com to Internet addresses, and BGP is the protocol that spreads routes in the Internet. In this talk, I will describe the new tools based on formal methods we have developed to proactively find and avoid bugs in DNS and BGP implementations and configurations. First, I will describe in detail a new technique, SCALE (NSDI 2022), for finding protocol compliance errors in DNS nameserver implementations that identified 30 new bugs in 8 popular open-source DNS implementations such as BIND, PowerDNS, KNOT, and NSD, and a generalization to finding bugs in BGP implementations using a tool called MESSI (NSDI 2024). Second, I will describe some ideas we proposed (HotNets 2023) for synthesizing network configurations using AI (specifically LLMs like GPT-4) by combining them with verifiers. I will end by describing what remains to complete the NDA vision.
Bio: George Varghese is the Jonathan B. Postel Distinguished Professor of Networking in the Computer Science department at UCLA. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017, the National Academy of Inventors in 2020, the Internet Hall of Fame in 2021, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. With colleagues, he won the NSDI 2024 (for HSA) and SIGCOMM 2024 (for P4) Test of Time Awards
Abstract: When Facebook/X is down for several hours, it affects our social life. Beyond interaction, the Internet matters greatly as more commerce is electronic (19 trillion per year). I will describe steps we have taken towards creating a new field, Network Design Automation (NDA). NDA seeks to create computer-aided design (CAD) tools for designing and managing networks to reduce design effort and increase reliability. A common meme is “If the Internet is down it’s always DNS, except if it's BGP”. For context, DNS is the protocol used in the Internet to translate domain names like cnn.com to Internet addresses, and BGP is the protocol that spreads routes in the Internet. In this talk, I will describe the new tools based on formal methods we have developed to proactively find and avoid bugs in DNS and BGP implementations and configurations. First, I will describe in detail a new technique, SCALE (NSDI 2022), for finding protocol compliance errors in DNS nameserver implementations that identified 30 new bugs in 8 popular open-source DNS implementations such as BIND, PowerDNS, KNOT, and NSD, and a generalization to finding bugs in BGP implementations using a tool called MESSI (NSDI 2024). Second, I will describe some ideas we proposed (HotNets 2023) for synthesizing network configurations using AI (specifically LLMs like GPT-4) by combining them with verifiers. I will end by describing what remains to complete the NDA vision.
Bio: George Varghese is the Jonathan B. Postel Distinguished Professor of Networking in the Computer Science department at UCLA. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017, the National Academy of Inventors in 2020, the Internet Hall of Fame in 2021, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. With colleagues, he won the NSDI 2024 (for HSA) and SIGCOMM 2024 (for P4) Test of Time Awards