FROOT: Future-Proof, Trustworthy Telemetry

With the growth of the Internet and its importance in supporting the US economy, business, health, education and other services, it is critical to ensure both high performance and high availability of the networks underlying it. Increasingly, such networks include a heterogeneous set of network switches and other devices which must be monitored and controlled in a coordinated manner. Emerging networked applications, such as cloud gaming or cloud streamed augmented reality, are expected to further stress both control systems and network monitoring by requiring real-time response to rapid changes in traffic workloads. This project aims to address the needs of future network control by enabling a network telemetry infrastructure that can provide timely, accurate, and trusted information about ongoing activities in the network.

This project proposes FROOT, a future-proof, trustworthy telemetry infrastructure for networks of heterogeneous programmable devices (e.g., programmable switch, SmartNIC, CPU, and DPU). The project takes an interdisciplinary approach spanning algorithms, systems, and security to inform the design and implementation of next generation telemetry systems through the following: (1) universal sketch-based algorithmic design and implementation for current and new measurement tasks and network devices; (2) novel network-wide resource optimization for handling network dynamics; and (3) trustworthy sketch deployment into heterogeneous devices to obtain critical telemetry information. The researchers also plan to deploy their network telemetry system at Mass Open Cloud testbed, an open public cloud project led by Boston University and other institutions in Massachusetts. The project will result in the development of open-source tools, algorithms, and prototype implementations that will reduce the time to deploy sketch-based telemetry in real-world scenarios.

Funding Source: NSF CNS-2107086, 10/1/2021 to 9/30/2025

People

  • Lead PI: Alan (Zaoxing) Liu
  • PIs: Srinivas Seshan (Co-PI, CMU), Manuel Egele (Co-PI, BU)
  • PhD Students: Peiqing Chen (BU), Anup Agarwal (CMU)
  • Ugrad Students: Jualia Hua (BU)

Publications

[NSDI] OctoSketch: Enabling Real-Time, Continuous Network Monitoring over Multiple Cores
Yinda Zhang, Peiqing Chen, Zaoxing Liu
to appear in USENIX NSDI’24

[NDSS] TrustSketch: Trustworthy Sketch-based Telemetry on Cloud Hosts
Zhuo Cheng, Maria Apostolaki, Zaoxing Liu, Vyas Sekar
to appear in NDSS Symposium’24

[NSDI] HeteroSketch: Coordinating Network-wide Monitoring in Heterogeneous and Dynamic Networks
Anup Agarwal, Zaoxing Liu, Srinivasan Seshan
in USENIX NSDI’22

[NSDI] SketchLib: Enabling Efficient Sketch-based Monitoring on Programmable Switches
Hun Namkung, Zaoxing Liu, Daehyeok Kim, Vyas Sekar, Peter Steenkiste
in USENIX NSDI’22

[IMC] Precise Error Estimation for Sketch-based Flow Measurement
Peiqing Chen, Yuhan Wu, Tong Yang, Junchen Jiang, Zaoxing Liu
in ACM/SIGCOMM IMC’21

Software

[SketchLib] Github

Outreach

Red Hat Summer Research Award