[talks] 11am Mon Dec 16 talk on integrating middleboxes into software-defined networking

[Jennifer Rexford]

Speaker: Professor Minlan Yu, USC
Title: Integrating Middleboxes into Software Defined Networking
Date/time: 11am Mon Dec 16
Place: 302 in CS building

Abstract: 

Networks today rely on middleboxes to provide critical performance, security, and policy compliance capabilities. Achieving these benefits and ensuring that the traffic is directed through the desired sequence of middleboxes requires significant manual effort and operator expertise. In this respect, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a promising alternative. Middleboxes, however, introduce new aspects (e.g., policy composition, resource management, dynamic traffic modifications) that fall outside the purvey of traditional L2/L3 functions that SDN supports (e.g., access control or routing). In this talk, we discuss two systems that integrate middleboxes into SDN: First, we propose SIMPLE, which enforces SDN policies with unmodified middleboxes and today’s OpenFlow APIs. Second, we discuss FlowTags, which takes minimal extension of middleboxes to ensure SDN tenets (Origin binding and paths following policy).

Bio:

Minlan Yu is an assistant professor in the computer science department of University of Southern California. She received her B.A. in computer science and mathematics from Peking University in 2006 and her M.A. and Ph.D in computer science from Princeton University in 2008 and 2011. After that she was a postdoctoral scholar in UC Berkeley for one year. She has actively collaborated with companies such as AT&T, Microsoft, and Bell Labs. Her research interest includes data networking, distributed systems, enterprise and data center networks, network virtualization, and software-defined networking. She received ACM SIGCOMM doctoral dissertation award in 2012 and Google research award in 2013.