CrossCheck: Input Validation for WAN Control Systems

TL;DR

CrossCheck is a validation system for WAN SDN controllers that detects invalid inputs to prevent outages, demonstrating high accuracy and low false positives in real-world and simulated environments.

Contribution

This paper introduces CrossCheck, a novel input validation system for WAN SDN controllers, effectively preventing network outages caused by invalid inputs.

Findings

Successfully prevented a major outage during deployment

Achieved 100% detection accuracy in simulations

Maintained near-zero false positives with noisy data

Abstract

We present CrossCheck, a system that validates inputs to the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller in a Wide Area Network (WAN). By detecting incorrect inputs - often stemming from bugs in the SDN control infrastructure - CrossCheck alerts operators before they trigger network outages. Our analysis at a large-scale WAN operator identifies invalid inputs as a leading cause of major outages, and we show how CrossCheck would have prevented those incidents. We deployed CrossCheck as a shadow validation system for four weeks in a production WAN, during which it accurately detected the single incident of invalid inputs that occurred while sustaining a 0% false positive rate under normal operation, hence imposing little additional burden on operators. In addition, we show through simulation that CrossCheck reliably detects a wide range of invalid inputs (e.g., detecting demand perturbations as small as 5% with 100% accuracy) and maintains a near-zero false positive rate for realistic levels of noisy, missing, or buggy telemetry data (e.g., sustaining zero false positives with up to 30% of corrupted telemetry data).