SBIR-STTR Award

Proactive Network Configuration Analysis
Award last edited on: 1/23/2019

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
NSF
Total Award Amount
$1,474,999
Award Phase
2
Solicitation Topic Code
IT
Principal Investigator
Ari Fogel

Company Information

Intentionet Inc

16625 Redmond Way Suite M241
Redmond, WA 98052
   (206) 579-6567
   info@intentionet.com
   www.intentionet.com
Location: Single
Congr. District: 01
County: King

Phase I

Contract Number: 1621685
Start Date: 7/1/2016    Completed: 6/30/2017
Phase I year
2016
Phase I Amount
$225,000
The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project stems from technology that automatically analyzes network configurations for errors. Computer networks are so tightly woven into the fabric of modern business and society that the delivery of almost all products and services relies on them. Yet networks are notoriously difficult to manage correctly today, and configuration errors that compromise availability, security, and performance are common. Today operators are left to simply wait for bad things to happen and then diagnose and repair the errors as quickly as possible to mitigate the damage. The technology developed in this project will enable organizations to identify network security and availability errors before they are introduced into the running network, thereby saving significant time and money, preventing unauthorized access to customer information, and minimizing down time. The project will also lead to a better understanding of the most prevalent kinds of network configuration errors and how to design networks to prevent them. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will perform the research and development necessary to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a proactive approach to detecting network configuration errors, as instantiated in a software tool. The key innovation underlying the approach is the ability to comprehensively and precisely model and validate the behavior of a network solely by analyzing the network's configuration files. The proposed work has three primary technical goals. First, configuration languages are extremely diverse and complex, so the tool currently only supports features that have been used by the networks to which it has been applied. A key challenge is to augment the logical model underlying the tool to support other features that are used by real-world networks. Second, the tool is currently computationally expensive for large networks. Scalability will be improved by leveraging the structure inherent in network configurations and topologies to perform configuration analysis modularly. Third, to be usable by network operators, the tool must integrate with existing source-control repositories and must provide an expressive interface enabling operators to explore the analysis results. In summary, these research directions will turn the software tool from a research prototype into an expressive, scalable, and usable tool for analyzing real networks.

Phase II

Contract Number: 1738555
Start Date: 9/15/2017    Completed: 8/31/2020
Phase II year
2017
(last award dollars: 2018)
Phase II Amount
$1,249,999

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project stems from technology for automatic network configuration analysis. As ever more devices connect to the Internet and rich services move to the "cloud," both the complexity of computer networks and their reliability requirements are rapidly escalating. It is no wonder that network outages and security breaches are common. Yet another side effect of this complexity, which does not make the headlines but is equally damaging, is that network engineers are understandably fearful of making configuration changes, so networks are unable to evolve at a speed that keeps up with changing business needs. The technology developed in this project will enable network engineers to validate correctness, security, and performance properties of their networks proactively, before errors reach the running network. This technology has the potential to improve the robustness of critical network infrastructure that is widely relied upon, to prevent unauthorized access to resources, and to increase the pace of innovation. The project will also provide insights into the largest "pain points" in modern networks and develop design and analysis techniques to address them.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project further develops the Batfish network configuration analysis technology. Interactions with pilot customers as well as many interviews with potential customers identified the needs of the marketplace and how the Batfish technology can best be adapted to meet those needs. As a result, the specific goal of this project is to seamlessly aid network engineers in validating network behavior during the policy design phase. Drawing inspiration from how software is developed today, the company will extend Batfish to support continuous integration of network configurations and develop a series of analyses that can find errors in network configurations with minimal input from the network engineers. The anticipated outcome of these research thrusts is a technology that allows network engineers to easily understand and gain confidence in their proposed network designs and to iterate these designs more quickly. The project will be driven by continued interactions with several pilot customers.