NetTrails: A Declarative Platform for Maintaining and Querying Provenance in Distributed Systems

The authors demonstrate NetTrails, a declarative platform for maintaining and interactively querying network provenance in a distributed system. Network provenance describes the history and derivations of network state that result from the execution of a distributed protocol. It has broad applicability in the management, diagnosis, and security analysis of networks. The demonstration shows the use of NetTrails for maintaining and querying network provenance in a variety of distributed settings, ranging from declarative networks to unmodified legacy distributed systems. They conclude the demonstration with a discussion of the ongoing research on enhancing the query language and security guarantees.