English

Scalable Verification of Probabilistic Networks

Programming Languages 2019-04-18 v1

Abstract

This paper presents McNetKAT, a scalable tool for verifying probabilistic network programs. McNetKAT is based on a new semantics for the guarded and history-free fragment of Probabilistic NetKAT in terms of finite-state, absorbing Markov chains. This view allows the semantics of all programs to be computed exactly, enabling construction of an automatic verification tool. Domain-specific optimizations and a parallelizing backend enable McNetKAT to analyze networks with thousands of nodes, automatically reasoning about general properties such as probabilistic program equivalence and refinement, as well as networking properties such as resilience to failures. We evaluate McNetKAT's scalability using real-world topologies, compare its performance against state-of-the-art tools, and develop an extended case study on a recently proposed data center network design.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.08096,
  title  = {Scalable Verification of Probabilistic Networks},
  author = {Steffen Smolka and Praveen Kumar and David M Kahn and Nate Foster and Justin Hsu and Dexter Kozen and Alexandra Silva},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.08096},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

extended version with appendix

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:42:19.634Z