  Proactive detection of network configuration bugs is important to ensure its
proper functioning and reduce cost of network administrator. In this research,
we propose to build the control plane verification engine MAVERICK that detects
the bugs in the network control plane i.e., network device configurations and
control plane states. MAVERICK automatically infers signatures for the control
plane configurations (e.g., ACLs, route-maps, route-policies and so on) and
states that allows administrators to automatically detect bugs with minimal
human intervention. MAVERICK achieves this by effectively leveraging any
structural deviation i.e., outliers in the network configurations that is
organized as simple or complexly nested key-value pairs. The outliers that are
calculated using signature-based outlier detection mechanism are further
characterized for its severity and ranked or re-prioritized according to their
criticality. We consider a wide set of heuristics and domain expertise factors
for effectively to reduce both false positives and false negatives.Our
evaluation on four medium to large-scale enterprise networks show that MAVERICK
can automatically detect the bugs present in the network with approximately 75%
accuracy. Further-more, With minimal administrator input i.e., with a few
minutes of signature re-tuning, MAVERICK allows the administrators to
effectively detect approximately 94 - 100% of the bugs present in the network,
thereby ranking down less severe bugs and removing false positives.
