Project Grant 2219862

This $375,000 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering program will fund the development of new technology to verify network-wide properties of dynamic data planes at Princeton University from October 2022 through September 2025. Specifically, the researchers will create formal specification and verification tools to check network configurations prior to deployment and monitor configurations as they execute. These tools will use a common language to represent data plane, control plane, and application layer events in verifying industrial computer networks that increasingly implement dynamic control logic. Static verification will detect issues before changes deploy, while dynamic monitoring will check assumptions and provide defense in depth. The tools are intended to substantially improve reliability in next-generation networks with programmable switches and network interface cards by bridging gaps between formal analysis and real-world scaling.