Runtime Verification of P4 Switches with Reinforcement Learning.

We present the design and early implementation of p4rl, a system that uses reinforcement learning-guided fuzz testing to execute the verification of P4 switches automatically at runtime. p4rl system uses our novel user-friendly query language, p4q to conveniently specify the intended properties in simple conditional statements (if-else) and check the actual runtime behavior of the P4 switch against such properties. In p4rl, user-specified p4q queries with the control plane configuration, Agent, and the Reward System guide the fuzzing process to trigger runtime bugs automatically during Agent training. To illustrate the strength of p4rl, we developed and evaluated an early prototype of p4rl system that executes runtime verification of a P4 network device, e.g., L3 (Layer-3) switch. Our initial results are promising and show that p4rl automatically detects diverse bugs while outperforming the baseline approach.