Jump to Content

KATch: A Fast Symbolic Verifier for NetKAT

Mark Moeller
Jules Jacobs
Olivier Savary Belanger
David Darais
Cole Schlesinger
Nate Foster
Alexandra Silva
Programming Languages and Implementation (PLDI) (2024) (to appear)
Google Scholar

Abstract

We develop new data structures and algorithms for checking verification queries in NetKAT, a domain-specific language for specifying the behavior of network data planes. Our results extend the techniques obtained in prior work on symbolic automata and provide a framework for building efficient and scalable verification tools. We present \KATch, an implementation of these ideas in Scala, including extended logical operators that are useful for expressing network-wide specifications and optimizations that construct a bisimulation quickly or generate a counter-example showing that none exists. We evaluate the performance of our implementation on real-world and synthetic benchmarks, verifying properties such as reachability and slice isolation, typically returning a result in well under a second, which is orders of magnitude faster than previous approaches.

Research Areas