Formal specification of SNMP MIB's using action semantics: the routing proxy case study

The usual way to describe the semantics of MIB objects is just to give an informal English text explaining each object's behavior. Informal descriptions are vague and incomplete. They are open to misinterpretation and may lead to inconsistent implementations. In this work we propose the use of action semantics as a simple and powerful tool for the formal description of the behavior of MIB objects. Formal descriptions may be used as the basis for systematic development, verification, and automatic generation of implementations. In our approach, operations for each MIB object can be simply added to the existing ASN.1 MIB descriptions, without implying in any modification of current standards. We initially define the semantics of the core SNMP server, as well as the snmpget and snmpset applications. This description is extensible, allowing the inclusion of any MIB. As a case study, we define the semantics of the experimental SNMP routing proxy MIB.