A Bottom-Up Approach for Extracting Network Intents

Abstract

Intent-Based Networking (IBN) is showing significant improvements in network management, especially by reducing the complexity by using intent-level languages. However, IBN is not yet integrated and widely deployed in most of the large-scale networks. Network operators may still encounter several issues deploying new intents, such as reasoning about complex configurations to understand previously deployed rules before writing an intent to update the network state. Large-scale networks may include several devices distributed in multiple hierarchical levels of its topology; each of these devices is configured using low-level, vendor-specific languages. Thus, inferring intents from these low-level configuration files can be an arduous and time-consuming task. Current solutions that derive high-level representations from bottom-up configuration analysis can not represent configurations in an intent-level. Moreover, they fail by not aggregating essential details to enhance the representation. In this work, we present a bottom-up process to extract intents from network configurations. To validate our approach, we develop a system called SCRIBE (SeCuRity Intent-Based Extractor), which decompiles security configurations from different network devices and translates them to an intent-level language called Nile. To demonstrate the feasibility of SCRIBE, we outline two case studies and evaluate our approach with dumps of real-world firewall configurations containing rules from various servers and institutions. Results show that our solution can represent configurations in intent-level and also maintain a high accuracy representing aspects of low-level configurations.

Consistent Composition of Data Plane Programs

“…In: IEEE Communications Magazine (Accepted for Publication) (Qualis: A1, Impact Factor: 11.052) [Parizotto et al 2021]Moreover, the efforts made during the development of this thesis also contributed to the following publications:• Flowstalker: Comprehensive traffic flow monitoring on the data plane using P4.In: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2019) (Qualis: A1)[Castanheira et al 2019] • A Bottom-Up Approach for Extracting Network Intents. In: International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2020) (Qualis: A2)[Ribeiro et al 2020]…”