Towards an efficient verification approach on network configuration

This paper presents our new design and implementation of a configuration verification system called ConfVS. With the increasing complexity of network configuration, verifying network behavior has become a highly time-consuming and error-prone process. Much research effort has been made to tackle this challenge. In this paper, we propose a formalization scheme based on binary decision diagram to model the entire network behavior specified by diverse configuration requirements (e.g., security policies, routing policies, and address translation rules), and design a set of algorithms to efficiently verify the compliance of network behavior to the requirements. Our experiments show that ConfVS can validate thousands of network devices configured by millions rules with ten times improved efficiency when compared to several well-known existing solutions.