Safely And Automatically Updating In-network ACL Configurations With Intent Language

Abstract

In-network Access Control List (ACL) is an important technique in ensuring network-wide connectivity and security. As cloud-scale WANs today constantly evolve in size and complexity, in-network ACL rules are becoming increasingly more complex. This presents a great challenge to the updating process of ACL configurations: network operators are frequently required to update "tangled" ACL rules across thousands of devices to meet diverse business requirements, and even a single ACL misconfiguration may lead to network disruptions. Such increasing challenges call for an automated system to improve the efficiency and correctness of ACL updates. This paper presents Jinjing, a system that aids Alibaba's network operators in automatically and correctly updating ACL configurations in Alibaba's global WAN. Jinjing allows the operators to express in a declarative language, named LAI, their update intent (e.g., ACL migration and traffic control). Then, Jinjing automatically synthesizes ACL update plans that satisfy their intent. At the heart of Jinjing, we develop a set of novel verification and synthesis techniques to rigorously guarantee the correctness of update plans. In Alibaba, our operators have used Jinjing to efficiently update their ACLs and have thus prevented significant service downtime.