Efficient traffic trajectory error detection

Our recent survey on publicly reported router bugs shows that many router bugs, once triggered, can cause various traffic trajectory errors including traffic deviating from its intended forwarding paths, traffic being mistakenly dropped and unauthorized traffic bypassing packet filters. These traffic trajectory errors are serious problems because they may cause network applications to fail and create security loopholes for network intruders to exploit. Therefore, traffic trajectory errors must be quickly and efficiently detected so that the corrective action can be performed in a timely fashion. Detecting traffic trajectory errors requires the real-time tracking of the control states (e.g., forwarding tables, packet filters) of routers and the scalable monitoring of the actual traffic trajectories in the network. Traffic trajectory errors can then be detected by efficiently comparing the observed traffic trajectories against the intended control states. Making such trajectory error detection efficient and practical for large-scale high speed networks requires us to address many challenges. First, existing traffic trajectory monitoring algorithms require the simultaneously monitoring of all network interfaces in a network for the packets of interest, which will cause a daunting monitoring overhead. To improve the efficiency of traffic trajectory monitoring, we propose the router group monitoring technique that only monitors the periphery interfaces of a set of selected router groups. We analyze a large number of real network topologies and show that effective router groups with high trajectory error detection rates exist in all cases. We then develop an analytical model for quickly and accurately estimating the detection rates of different router groups. Based on this model, we propose an algorithm to select a set of router groups that can achieve complete error detection and low monitoring overhead. Second, maintaining the control states of all the routers in the network requires a significant amount of memory. However, there exist no studies on how to efficiently store multiple complex packet filters. We propose to store multiple packet filters using a shared Hyper- Cuts decision tree. To help decide which subset of packet filters should share a HyperCuts decision tree, we first identify a number of important factors that collectively impact the efficiency of the resulting shared HyperCuts decision tree. Based on the identified factors, we then propose to use machine learning techniques to predict whether any pair of packet filters should share a tree. Given the pair-wise prediction matrix, a greedy heuristic algorithm is used to classify packet filters into a number of shared HyperCuts decision trees. Our experiments using both real packet filters and synthetic packet filters show that our shared HyperCuts decision trees require considerably less memory while having the same or a slightly higher average height than separate trees. In addition, the shared HyperCuts decision trees enable concurrent lookup of multiple packet filters sharing the same tree. Finally, based on the two proposed techniques, we have implemented a complete prototype system that is compatible with Juniper's JUNOS. We have shown in the thesis that, to detect traffic trajectory errors, it is sufficient to only selectively implement a small set of key functions of a full-fletched router on our prototype, which makes our prototype simpler and less error prone. We conduct both Emulab experiments and micro-benchmark experiments to show that the system can efficiently track router control states, monitor traffic trajectories and detect traffic trajectory errors.