A formal method to detect possible P4 specific errors
Gabriella Tóth, Máté Tejfel · Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems · 2019
P4 is a programming language to develop data processing of networks.This kind of programs are used in network devices -like switches -to describe the way of forwarding the received packets to the proper device.Checking the correctness of these programs is not an obvious task, because they can easily hide the run time errors.We are working on a method to detect violation of P4 specific properties.The method is based on a rule system, which can detect suspicious program parts and indicate the violated property.It helps to detect and correct real errors easily.As a first step, we introduce the main idea, dealing with the access of invalid header and uninitialized fields.We also present a case study to demonstrate the applicability of the method.