NetRep: Automatic Repair for Network Programs

TL;DR

NetRep is an automated tool that repairs network programs by localizing faults through symbolic reasoning and synthesizing patches to pass all unit tests, simplifying complex data structures and reusing analysis modules.

Contribution

This paper introduces NetRep, a novel automated repair approach specifically designed for network programs, combining symbolic reasoning with domain-specific abstractions.

Findings

NetRep successfully repaired network programs in 10 real-world benchmarks.

The tool demonstrated high effectiveness and efficiency in fault localization and patch synthesis.

NetRep outperforms existing methods in repairing complex network code.

Abstract

Debugging imperative network programs is a challenging task for developers because understanding various network modules and complicated data structures is typically time-consuming. To address the challenge, this paper presents an automated technique for repairing network programs from unit tests. Specifically, given as input a faulty network program and a set of unit tests, our approach localizes the fault through symbolic reasoning, and synthesizes a patch such that the repaired program can pass all unit tests. It applies domain-specific abstraction to simplify network data structures and utilizes modular analysis to facilitate function summary reuse for symbolic analysis. We implement the proposed techniques in a tool called NetRep and evaluate it on 10 benchmarks adapted from real-world software-defined networking controllers. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of NetRep for repairing network programs.