CIRC: Dev: Enhancing Scientific Research Infrastructure with Network Attestation and Provenance

Network testbeds provide shared platforms for researchers to carry out a wide range of network experiments. These platforms are constantly being reconfigured as researchers temporarily lease resources for their experiments. These resources increasingly involve programmable network hardware and software -- such as smart network interfaces and programmable soft switches -- that are used by researchers to develop new ideas.

Moreover, programmable networking can also support the reconfiguration of testbed infrastructure itself to provide both flexibility and high performance. But this diffuse programmability introduces new challenges for observability of the network's state -- both from the perspective of the network operators and that of its users. This project will develop a new type of research instrument for observing the rapid and diffused state changes that are possible in programmable networks.

This project brings together investigators from Illinois Institute of Technology, SRI International, and Georgetown University, to apply three concepts to network testbeds: (1) Remote Data Plane Attestation: Develop evidence generation, provenance capture, and program state attestation capabilities for a P4 programmable network device as well as "tuning parameters" to enable researchers and testbed operators to trade-off integrity assurance with computational overhead, (2) Programmable Network Provenance: Provide testbed users (network researchers and testbed operators) trustworthy information about past network configurations to establish ground truth, perform troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis of aberrant network behavior, and (3) User-Centric Network Views and Analytics: Provide testbed users with the capability of filters and faceted queries that provide trustworthy views of network equipment state and paths taken by network flows.

This project will produce the following societal advancements: (1) improve the trustworthiness and reproducibility of scientific results discovered on programmable network testbeds, (2) contribute to open-source software tools for attested network provenance, (3) build new connections between members of the project team with the FABRIC testbed research community, and (4) educate undergraduate and graduate students through coursework and internships.

The materials developed in this project -- including code, documentation, and papers -- will be made available at http://crease.cs.iit.edu

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.