OpenStack networking for humans: Symbolic execution to the rescue

Neutron is the OpenStack component that implements networking and it has been mocked and derided the weakest line in OpenStack [11]. We propose to use network symbolic execution to improve Neutron's ability to correctly implement tenant policies and to provide tenant traffic isolation. We propose to apply symbolic execution on two different OpenStack layers: the tenant view of the network and the actual deployment. Analyzing the tenant view is useful in many ways; first, it helps the tenant better understand its configuration's behavior before deployment. Secondly, its outputs can be compared to the analysis of the deployment to check if they are equivalent. We have built a prototype implementation and conducted preliminary evaluation, finding that we can verify our department's OpenStack deployment in seconds and detect certain common Neutron problems.