Formal Analysis of Network Protocols

Today’s Internet is becoming increasingly complex and fragile. Current performance centric techniques on network analysis and runtime verification have became inadequate in the development of robust networks. To cope with these challenges there is a growing interest in the use of formal analysis techniques to reason about network protocol correctness throughout the network development cycle. This talk surveys recent work on the use of formal analysis techniques to aid in design, implementation, and analysis of network protocols. We first present a general framework that covers a majority of existing formal analysis techniques on both the control and routing planes of networks, and present a classification and taxonomy of techniques according to the proposed framework. Using four representative case studies (Metarouting, rcc, axiomatic formulation, and Alloy based analysis), we discuss various aspects of formal network analysis, including formal specification, formal verification, and system validation. Their strengths and limitations are evaluated and compared in detail