Automatic Repair for Network Programs

Lei Shi, Yuepeng Wang, Rajeev Alur, Boon Thau Loo

Abstract: Debugging imperative network programs is a difficult task for operators as it requires understanding various network modules and complicated data structures. For this purpose, this paper presents an automated technique for repairing network programs with respect to unit tests. Given as input a faulty network program and a set of unit tests, our approach localizes the fault through symbolic reasoning, and synthesizes a patch ensuring that the repaired program passes all unit tests. It applies domain-specific abstraction to simplify network data structures and exploits function summary reuse for modular symbolic analysis. We have implemented the proposed techniques in a tool called NetRep and evaluated it on 10 benchmarks adapted from real-world software-defined network controllers. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of NetRep for repairing network programs.