2022 was one of our best year ever, on many accounts. Check out our activity report to see what our group has been up to and what is in the tank for us for 2023.

Our paper "Reducing P4 Language's Voluminosity using Higher-Level Constructs" has been accepted at EuroP4 2022! In this paper, we present O4, an extension of P4, that incorporates three higher-level constructs (arrays, loops, and factories) to reduce the voluminosity of P4 code. 

Our paper entitled "Learning to Configure Computer Networks with Neural Algorithmic Reasoning" was accepted at NeurIPS 2022! In this paper, we explain how we can approximate routing computations using neural networks. Among others, doing so allows us to efficiently "invert" these computations enabling to automatically synthesize configurations from their intended output. This synthesis problem is known to be hard: actually, our recent ICNP 2022 paper shows that many instances of that problem are NP-hard/NP-complete. Having a away to approximate these computations allows us to "break" the inherent scalability barrier of solving these problems, at the price of accuracy. How to deal with this accuracy loss is amongst the many next questions we want to look at. Stay tuned!

Our group will have two papers at this upcoming ACM HotNets workshop! These two papers will mark our 10th and 11th HotNets papers since 2014.

Stay tuned to learn more about:

1) How we plan to build the next-generation of network traffic generator by leveraging millions of code repositories hosted on code-sharing platforms such as GitHub;

and

2) How we intend to build generalizable machine learning (ML) models for predicting network traffic dynamics using the Transformer architecture.

As usual, you'll find the final version of the papers on our publications page in a couple of weeks.

We're thrilled to welcome two new post-docs in our team: Georgia Fragkouli (from EPFL) and Muoi Tran (from NUS)! 

This summer treated us well thus far, with no less than five papers acceptance! Stay tuned to learn more about:

1. Improved traffic monitoring (NSDI'23)
2. How to extend distributed routing protocols (NSDI'23)
3. The computational complexity behind configuration synthesis (ICNP'22)
4. How programmable networks can enable mass surveillance, and how to avoid it (SOSR'22)
5. How often was the Internet infrastructure down these last few years (IMC'22)

As usual, all the papers will be made available on our publications page.

Our group will be well represented at this upcoming ACM SIGCOMM; we have three accepted papers! Stay tuned to learn more about: pulse-wave DDoS mitigations (ACC-Turbo), fast gray failure detection (FANcY), and buffer management in data centers (ABM). See you in Amsterdam!

Rüdiger Birkner, a fresh NSG PhD graduate, just won the Roger Needham PhD Award! The Roger Needham PhD award is an annual prize awarded to a PhD student from a European University whose thesis is considered to be an exceptional, innovative contribution to knowledge in the systems area. 

2021, wrapped! Check out our activity report to see what our group has been up to in terms of research and teaching activities. Spoiler alert: 2021 was busy, but fulfilling!

Curious about what happened in the Internet in 2021? Check out this print depicting 1 year worth of BGP routing announcements observed on 256 Internet routers. "Behind the scenes" information available here. 

Laurent gave the introductory keynote at ACM CoNEXT 2021. The talk is entitled "The three tales of (correct) network operations" and summarizes our 10-year (and counting!) journey exploring the operational aspects of routing algorithms, focusing on three aspects in particular: verification, synthesis, and reconfiguration. You can find the slides here.

Tibor Schneider is one of this year's recipients of the ABB Research Award (ABB Forschungspreis) for his Master's Thesis entitled "Snowcap: Synthesizing Network-Wide Configuration Updates". He received the award at this year's "ETH Tag" on 20 November.

Laurent was selected for the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM "Rising Star" Award. The award is in recognition for outstanding research contributions, early in his career, toward improving the flexibility, correctness, and security of Internet routing. More information about the award and past recipients can be found online.

Maria Apostolaki (2nd PhD student to graduate from NSG) will join Princeton's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Fall of 2022! Huge congrats to her!!

Our paper on how to synthesize safe network-wide configuration updates got accepted at ACM SIGCOMM 2021! Stay tuned to learn about how to schedule configuration updates in networks running distributed routing protocols while maintaining important safety properties.

I had a lot of fun describing how we approach online teaching nowadays, and how we evolved our setup over the last 3 semesters already. If you are interested, you can checkout the talk recording here, and access the slides here.

Laurent will co-chair ACM HotNets 2021 (the ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks) together with Prof. Minlan Yu from Harvard.

2020 has been a really "particular" year—including for our research group. And yet, despite everything, 2020 was also a good year for us. Check out our latest activity report to learn more about our research and teaching activities (and successes) in 2020.

2 NSG papers (xBGP and Config2Spec) were recognized with an IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes (ANRP) this year! (Only 6 papers out of 76 submissions were awarded this year.)

Our paper on "meta" network verification got accepted at the upcoming USENIX NSDI 2021! Stay tuned to learn about how we can automatically detect bugs lurking in network verifiers themselves.

Maria's latest paper on how to de-anonymize cryptocurrencies transactions by abusing Internet routing got accepted to Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2021 (FC 2021)! 

Laurent gave the keynote talk at EuroP4 (the 3rd P4 Workshop in Europe). He spoke about data-plane offloading (in the context of routing tasks) and programmable packet scheduling. You can check the talk on YouTube here, and the slides here. The talk is based on three recent NSG projects: Hardware-Accelerated Network Control Planes [HotNet's18], Blink [NSDI'19], and SP-PIFO [NSDI'20].

After having won two Golden Owls in 2016 and 2019, Laurent has been awarded the Credit Suisse Award for Best Teaching! The aim of the prize, which is awarded by the student association VSETH, is to promote quality teaching, and to strengthen Switzerland as a science and research location. Huge kudos to our teaching assistants without whom this wouldn't have been possible!

Our paper on the impact of routing security on overlay networks (including Tor and cryptocurrencies) has been accepted to Communications of the ACM!

As of Sept. 1st, three new members have joined NSG as PhD students. Welcome to Rui, Ege, and Roland!

Our group got two papers accepted at ACM HotNets 2020! (It's now the seventh year in a row that our group publishes at least one HotNets paper).

Our paper on probabilistic network verification won one of the two "Best Student Paper Awards" at SIGCOMM 2020! Congrats to the entire team, and especially to Sam, the project lead.

Besides reading the paper, you can learn more about the project by trying out the code or by watching the presentation.

"An Open Platform to Teach How the Internet Practically Works" is one of the three papers selected for being presented at ACM SIGCOMM 2020 in the Best of CCR session. Congratulations to the whole development team, and especially to Thomas, Tobias, and Tino!

Read more about the project in this APNIC blog post. 

Our public repository containing pedagogical material, demo and exercises to learn P4 programming has reached the symbolic bar of 100 stars on GitHub! Congratulations to Edgar who put most of the material together!

Stay tuned to learn how one can verify not only "hard" network properties that must hold all the time, but also probabilistic properties that must hold a fraction of the time (such as Service Level Agreements).

Romain obtained his PhD from ETH Zurich (ITET) under the supervision of Prof. Lothar Thiele. Welcome!

Our group will offer three lectures this semester including a completely renewed Advanced Topics in Communication Networks lecture which will focus on advanced topics in Internet routing and forwarding. We'll also offer a seminar on Communication Networks (in collaboration with D-INFK). Finally, and as usual now, we'll teach the first part of Discrete Event Systems together with Prof. Lothar Thiele and Prof. Roger Wattenhofer. Check out our course webpage for more info.

Laurent got promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure) by the ETH Board!

Coralie Busse-Grawitz, one of our master students and future PhD student, is one of this year's recipients of the ABB Research Award (ABB Forschungspreis) for her Master's Thesis entitled "In-Network Inference with Random Forests". She received the award at this year's "ETH Tag" on 16 November.

For the second time after 2016, Laurent has been awarded the Golden Owl of the VSETH! The Owl is awarded by the VSETH, ETH Zurich's students association, and "honours lecturers who have provided exceptional teaching". Huge kudos to the teaching assistants from NSG without whom this wouldn't have been possible!

Stay tuned to learn about how adversarial traffic inputs can mislead “data-driven” networks.

We just uploaded the final versions of our two upcoming NSDI 2020 papers: Config2Spec (specification mining) and SP-PIFO (programmable scheduling). Check them out! 

Ahmed El-Hassany is the first PhD student graduating from our group! You can check out his work on network configuration synthesis and network verification here.

Laurent got awarded an ERC Starting Grant. The grant (SyNET) aims at automatically generating correct network configurations rather than verifying them. This also means that our group will soon recruit PhD students and postdocs. Ping us if interested!

Starting from this fall, our group will offer a new seminar lecture. This year's topic will be "Learning, Reasoning and Control" in the context of communication networks. You can find more information about the seminar on our website: seminar-net.ethz.ch. Please note that the number of seats is limited to 24.

We got two accepted papers at the upcoming NSDI (Spring deadline)! Stay tuned to learn about how to automatically "mine" network specifications from existing configurations (with Config2Spec) and how to closely approximate the behavior of programmable packet schedulers at scale, and on existing devices (with SP-PIFO).

This semester we taught our first lecture on programmable data planes (check out the rest of our courses). Today we're happy to release all our materials including: slides, docs, examples, VM, and 7 weeks of detailed P4 exercises (with solutions): GitHub: https://github.com/nsg-ethz/p4-learning Course Website: https://adv-net.ethz.ch

See adv-net.ethz.ch for more details.

We just released our new website (net2text.ethz.ch) covering our work on network explainability with Net2Text. Check it out to see how we can make networks "talk" proper English.

Maria got nominated for her work on routing attacks on cryptocurrencies which got published at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. This is the fourth ANRP prizes our group receives, after DRAGON, Fibbing, and our work on seamless BGP reconfiguration.