Guaranteeing that large scale networks are always operated as policy goals dictate is critical for network availability, security, and performance. The problem is challenging, as it should not only assure the correctness of policy configurations across various network devices, but also guarantee the faithfulness of policy enforcement on actual packet forwarding behaviors. In this article, we provide a systematic overview of the direction of network verification, which covers both verification of network configurations and assurance of device actual behaviors. In particular, we summarize state-of-the-art designs with focuses from early stateless data planes with switches/routers to more recent stateful ones containing middleboxes. After analyzing and comparing these works, we also specify future directions in the verification of stateful networks.

中文翻译：

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迈向全面的网络验证：实践，挑战和超越

确保大型网络始终按照策略目标指示运行，这对于网络可用性，安全性和性能至关重要。这个问题具有挑战性，因为它不仅应确保跨各种网络设备的策略配置的正确性，而且还应保证对实际数据包转发行为的策略实施的真实性。在本文中，我们提供了网络验证方向的系统概述，涵盖了网络配置的验证和设备实际行为的保证。特别是，我们总结了最新的设计，重点是从早期的带有交换机/路由器的无状态数据平面到包含中间盒的较新的有状态平面。在分析和比较这些工作之后，我们还将在有状态网络的验证中指定未来的方向。