Debuglet: Programmable Network Debugging Infrastructure

Status:

This project started in 2023 and is ongoing.

Researchers

Seyedali Tabaeiaghdaei (ETH)
Dr. Jonghoon Kwon (ETH)
Prof. Dr. Adrian Perrig (ETH)
Patrick Bamert (ZKB)

Industry partner

ZKB

Description

Debuglet is an advanced distributed network debugging infrastructure designed to enhance end-user debugging on the Internet. Today’s end-user debugging is limited to primitive tools like ping and traceroute, leaving users with insufficient data for isolating network faults and no means of external result validation. Debuglet offers a deployable, incentivized architecture that enables near-path network debugging using real data packets and user-defined code for precise and adaptable network performance measurements.

In this system, Autonomous Systems (ASes) deploy small-scale cloud services for network measurement applications. The Debuglet executor, distributed at the edge of ASes, provides a policy-constrained remote code execution environment. Users can perform real-world data-plane operations by distributing and executing network measurement applications at different vantage points. 

Users can pay to run their network debugging apps in these environments, and the results can be certified by the deploying AS for third-party verification. This infrastructure significantly improves end-user debugging, accelerates network issue identification, and introduces innovative business models for ASes, with even a partial deployment proving beneficial for users.

 

Publications

Seyedali Tabaeiaghdaei, Filippo Costa, Jonghoon Kwon, Patrick Bamert, Yih-Chun Hu, and Adrian Perrig.
Debuglet: Programmable and Verifiable Inter-domain Network Telemetry.
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2024.
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