Enforcing Secure and Robust Routing With Declarative Policies

Internet routers must adhere to many polices governing the selection of paths that meet potentially complex constraints on length, security, symmetry and organizational preferences. Many routing problems are caused by their misconfiguration, usually due to a combination of human errors and the lack of a high-level formal language for specifying routing policies that can be used to generate router configurations. This paper describes an approach that obviates many problems by using a declarative language for specifying network-wide routing policies to automatically configure routers and also inform software agents that can diagnose and correct networking problems.