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Shir Landau Feibish

Publications and source records attributed to Shir Landau Feibish.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

SprayCheck: Finding Gray Failures in Adaptive Routing Networks

Distributed machine learning (ML) training has become a dominant workload in modern data center networks, operating at massive scale with clusters comprising tens to hundreds of thousands of GPUs. The scale of these networks makes failures, and particularly gray failures, inevitable. Gray failures can significantly degrade both network and application performance, yet they are notoriously difficult to detect, localize, and debug. To meet the performance demands of ML workloads, adaptive routing is widely deployed to maximize network utilization by dynamically spreading traffic across many paths. While adaptive routing increases network utilization, it also greatly intensifies the effect of gray failures. Prior work has either dismissed gray failures as negligible or proposed detection mechanisms that fail to scale, rendering these approaches increasingly impractical for large-scale clusters. We present SprayCheck, a passive gray failure detection system that leverages the statistical properties of adaptive routing and network load balancing. By combining these properties with flow-level information, SprayCheck can identify failures before they significantly impact application performance, enabling preemptive rerouting and improving overall performance. Importantly, this is achieved through passive observation of traffic spraying, without introducing additional load on the network. We evaluate SprayCheck and show that it can detect and localize a single-link packet-drop-rate $1.5\%$ within a single iteration and as little as $0.5\%$ within 5 training iterations of Llama-3 70B in a 64 spine topology.

cs.NI↗

NODE: Network Wide Top-K Flows in the Data Plane

Monitoring network traffic is crucial for most network tasks, such as, identifying and blocking attacks, pinpointing failures and engineering and rerouting heavy traffic to maintain high throughput. One important metric when monitoring the traffic is finding the top-k heavy flows, that is the k heaviest flows in the traffic. Programmable networks allow performing advanced network analysis right in the data plane. In recent years, various solutions have been proposed for efficiently finding the top-k heavy flows within a single switch. However, at times we may need to find the global top-k flows. Existing solutions for global top-k detection use a centralized controller that collects and aggregates the measurements performed in each of the switches. Yet, the process of sending information to the control plane and then having the controller send back the information to the switches can be very lengthy. In order to be able to detect and mitigate short-lived events, solutions that work completely within the data plane are needed. In this paper we present NODE, a network-wide top-k detection algorithm that operates exclusively in the data plane. NODE allows the switches to aggregate information from all other switches in the network, and ensures that eventually all switches hold an identical global top-k table. We show that NODE manages to detect global top-k flows on both synthetic and real traces, with a recall rate of over 95\% while using less than 300KB per switch.

cs.NI↗

Measuring Round-Trip Response Latencies Under Asymmetric Routing

Latency is a key indicator of Internet service performance. Continuously tracking the latency of client requests enables service operators to quickly identify bottlenecks, perform adaptive resource allocation or routing, and mitigate attacks. Passively measuring the response latency at intermediate vantage points is attractive since it provides insight into the experience of real clients without requiring client instrumentation or incurring probing overheads. This paper presents PIRATE, a passive approach to measure response latencies when only the client-to-server traffic is visible, even when transport headers are encrypted. PIRATE estimates the time gap between causal pairs - two requests such that the response to the first triggered the second - as a proxy for the client-side response latency. Our experiments with a realistic web application show that PIRATE can estimate the response latencies measured at the client application layer to within 1 percent. A PIRATE-enhanced layer-4 load balancer (with DSR) cuts tail latencies by 37 percent.

cs.NI↗

ReAct: Reflection Attack Mitigation For Asymmetric Routing

Amplification Reflection Distributed Denial-of-Service (AR-DDoS) attacks remain a formidable threat, exploiting stateless protocols to flood victims with illegitimate traffic. Recent advances have enabled data-plane defenses against such attacks, but existing solutions typically assume symmetric routing and are limited to a single switch. These assumptions fail in modern networks where asymmetry is common, resulting in dropped legitimate responses and persistent connectivity issues. This paper presents ReAct, an in-network defense for AR-DDoS that is robust to asymmetry. ReAct performs request-response correlation across switches using programmable data planes and a sliding-window of Bloom filters. To handle asymmetric traffic, ReAct introduces a data-plane-based request forwarding mechanism, enabling switches to validate responses even when paths differ. ReAct can automatically adapt to routing changes with minimal intervention, ensuring continued protection even in dynamic network environments. We implemented ReAct on both a P4 interpreter and NVIDIAs Bluefield-3, demonstrating its applicability across multiple platforms. Evaluation results show that ReAct filters nearly all attack traffic without dropping legitimate responses-even under high-volume attacks and asymmetry. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, ReAct achieves significantly lower false positives. To our knowledge, ReAct is the first data-plane AR-DDoS defense that supports dynamic, cross-switch collaboration, making it uniquely suitable for deployment in networks with asymmetry.

cs.NI↗

SpliDT: Partitioned Decision Trees for Scalable Stateful Inference at Line Rate

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly being deployed in programmable data planes (switches and SmartNICs) to enable real-time traffic analysis, security monitoring, and in-network decision-making. Decision trees (DTs) are particularly well-suited for these tasks due to their interpretability and compatibility with data-plane architectures, i.e., match-action tables (MATs). However, existing in-network DT implementations are constrained by the need to compute all input features upfront, forcing models to rely on a small, fixed set of features per flow. This significantly limits model accuracy and scalability under stringent hardware resource constraints. We present SPLIDT, a system that rethinks DT deployment in the data plane by enabling partitioned inference over sliding windows of packets. SPLIDT introduces two key innovations: (1) it assigns distinct, variable feature sets to individual sub-trees of a DT, grouped into partitions, and (2) it leverages an in-band control channel (via recirculation) to reuse data-plane resources (both stateful registers and match keys) across partitions at line rate. These insights allow SPLIDT to scale the number of stateful features a model can use without exceeding hardware limits. To support this architecture, SPLIDT incorporates a custom training and design-space exploration (DSE) framework that jointly optimizes feature allocation, tree partitioning, and DT model depth. Evaluation across multiple real-world datasets shows that SPLIDT achieves higher accuracy while supporting up to 5x more stateful features than prior approaches (e.g., NetBeacon and Leo). It maintains the same low time-to-detection (TTD) as these systems, while scaling to millions of flows with minimal recirculation overhead (<0.05%).

cs.NI↗

Compact Data Structures for Network Telemetry

Collecting and analyzing of network traffic data (network telemetry) plays a critical role in managing modern networks. Network administrators analyze their traffic to troubleshoot performance and reliability problems, and to detect and block cyberattacks. However, conventional traffic-measurement techniques offer limited visibility into network conditions and rely on offline analysis. Fortunately, network devices -- such as switches and network interface cards -- are increasingly programmable at the packet level, enabling flexible analysis of the traffic in place, as the packets fly by. However, to operate at high speed, these devices have limited memory and computational resources, leading to trade-offs between accuracy and overhead. In response, an exciting research area emerged, bringing ideas from compact data structures and streaming algorithms to bear on important networking telemetry applications and the unique characteristics of high-speed network devices. In this paper, we review the research on compact data structures for network telemetry and discuss promising directions for future research.

cs.NI↗

Automated Optimization of Parameterized Data-Plane Programs with Parasol

Programmable data planes allow for sophisticated applications that give operators the power to customize the functionality of their networks. Deploying these applications, however, often requires tedious and burdensome optimization of their layout and design, in which programmers must manually write, compile, and test an implementation, adjust the design, and repeat. In this paper we present Parasol, a framework that allows programmers to define general, parameterized network algorithms and automatically optimize their various parameters. The parameters of a Parasol program can represent a wide variety of implementation decisions, and may be optimized for arbitrary, high-level objectives defined by the programmer. Furthermore, optimization may be tailored to particular environments by providing a representative sample of traffic. We show how we implement the Parasol framework, which consists of a sketching language for writing parameterized programs, and a simulation-based optimizer for testing different parameter settings. We evaluate Parasol by implementing a suite of ten data-plane applications, and find that Parasol produces a solution with comparable performance to hand-optimized P4 code within a two-hour time budget.

cs.NI↗

Routing Oblivious Measurement Analytics

Network-wide traffic analytics are often needed for various network monitoring tasks. These measurements are often performed by collecting samples at network switches, which are then sent to the controller for aggregation. However, performing such analytics without ``overcounting'' flows or packets that traverse multiple measurement switches is challenging. Therefore, existing solutions often simplify the problem by making assumptions on the routing or measurement switch placement. We introduce AROMA, a measurement infrastructure that generates a uniform sample of packets and flows regardless of the topology, workload and routing. Therefore, AROMA can be deployed in many settings, and can also work in the data plane using programmable PISA switches. The AROMA infrastructure includes controller algorithms that approximate a variety of essential measurement tasks while providing formal accuracy guarantees. Using extensive simulations on real-world network traces, we show that our algorithms are competitively accurate compared to the best existing solutions despite the fact that they make no assumptions on the underlying network or the placement of measurement switches.

cs.NI↗

Detecting Heavy Flows in the SDN Match and Action Model

Efficient algorithms and techniques to detect and identify large flows in a high throughput traffic stream in the SDN match-and-action model are presented. This is in contrast to previous work that either deviated from the match and action model by requiring additional switch level capabilities or did not exploit the SDN data plane. Our construction has two parts; (a) how to sample in an SDN match and action model, (b) how to detect large flows efficiently and in a scalable way, in the SDN model. Our large flow detection methods provide high accuracy and present a good and practical tradeoff between switch - controller traffic, and the number of entries required in the switch flow table. Based on different parameters, we differentiate between heavy flows, elephant flows and bulky flows and present efficient algorithms to detect flows of the different types. Additionally, as part of our heavy flow detection scheme, we present sampling methods to sample packets with arbitrary probability $p$ per packet or per byte that traverses an SDN switch. Finally, we show how our algorithms can be adapted to a distributed monitoring SDN setting with multiple switches, and easily scale with the number of monitoring switches.

cs.NI↗

Efficient Distinct Heavy Hitters for DNS DDoS Attack Detection

Motivated by a recent new type of randomized Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the Domain Name Service (DNS), we develop novel and efficient distinct heavy hitters algorithms and build an attack identification system that uses our algorithms. Heavy hitter detection in streams is a fundamental problem with many applications, including detecting certain DDoS attacks and anomalies. A (classic) heavy hitter (HH) in a stream of elements is a key (e.g., the domain of a query) which appears in many elements (e.g., requests). When stream elements consist of a pairs, ( ) a distinct heavy hitter (dhh) is a key that is paired with a large number of different subkeys. Our dHH algorithms are considerably more practical than previous algorithms. Specifically the new fixed-size algorithms are simple to code and with asymptotically optimal space accuracy tradeoffs. In addition we introduce a new measure, a combined heavy hitter (cHH), which is a key with a large combination of distinct and classic weights. Efficient algorithms are also presented for cHH detection. Finally, we perform extensive experimental evaluation on real DNS attack traces, demonstrating the effectiveness of both our algorithms and our DNS malicious queries identification system.

cs.CR↗