Why this Paper isn’t useful ? Towards a logic for Wide-Area Internet routing Why this Paper isn’t useful ? -Ajay Gulati

Outline for offense Discuss the contributions of paper How are they not so useful How the paper is unorganized Why is the paper unconvincing

What does this paper provide(or thinks it does)? A framework to reason about new routing protocols prove facts about and modify existing protocols A description of routing logic Proofs of certain characteristics of BGP Use of routing logic in analyzing properties of a protocol

A framework which is… Incomplete Doesn’t consider issues like scalability, traffic engineering No support for temporal reasoning From paper: “BGP’s complexity stems not from its deceptively simple specification, but rather from its dynamic behavior during operation” “the routing logic requires the following inputs 1) specification of the protocol 2) specification of the protocol configuration” Conclusion: Framework is either useless or too restrictive

A Routing logic which is… Not formally specified (happens when systems people publish a theoretical paper) Not much used even in the paper itself Not proved to be sound Inspired from BAN logic but nowhere close in description details http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Security/program2/bleeker/index.html

Proofs about BGP features… Properties already proved are revisited (Santa’s universal point) Mostly done using counterexamples – adapted from previous papers Authors are too scared to use the logic may be its too complex to use, or it may not work for all cases, may be its self contradictory NP-completeness proof’s is doubtful or incomplete

Use of routing logic No clear description on mapping a protocol specification to routing logic formulas What exactly is the logic definition? How complex is the “express ability” of this logic? Bound on deductions in the logic? Even Authors aren’t too confident about using it…..

Some other flaws Use of routing logic is shown only for already known results – and claim is “its going to be a very useful tool to design new protocols” Presentation is unorganized and not very clear

Conclusions Paper tries to provide an abstract idea Even the idea isn’t original – has been suggested before (40 citations !) Misses a lot of details about the logic, which should be more formal (systems people can’t help it) Paper isn’t convincing- no one is going to use routing logic