Network Specification Mining with High Fidelity and Scalability

Network specification, which describes what an existing network is designed for, can help operators better understand and manage their networks, and is a critical pre-condition for network verification and synthesis tools to work. Mining specification with existing tools either cannot scale to large networks, or scale better at a cost of sacrificing fidelity. This paper presents NetMiner, which can simultaneously achieve high scalability and fidelity. The key idea of NetMiner is to use off-the-shelf network simulators to compute routes, and then check properties with data plane verifiers, so as to achieve a high fidelity. At the same time, NetMiner improves the scalability by identifying relevant failure scenarios, and aggregating them to significantly reduce the number of needed simulations. This process is solely based on the routes returned by the simulators and therefore preserving fidelity. Experiments using real configurations from a large cloud service provider and synthetic configurations show that NetMiner is about 10 times faster than the state-of-the-art.