NEST: Network Enforced Session Types (Technical Report)
For developers of distributed systems, NEST provides a novel approach to protocol enforcement that offloads monitoring to the network fabric, reducing application overhead.
NEST introduces a runtime verification framework that enforces application-level protocols directly in the network data plane by synthesizing packet-level monitors from session types, handling packet loss and reordering, and demonstrating enforcement of realistic protocols on microservice and network-function models.
This paper introduces NEST (Network-Enforced Session Types), a runtime verification framework that moves application-level protocol monitoring into the network fabric. Unlike prior work that instruments or wraps application code, we synthesize packet-level monitors that enforce protocols directly in the data plane. We develop algorithms to generate network-level monitors from session types and extend them to handle packet loss and reordering. We implement NEST in P4 and evaluate it on applications including microservice and network-function models, showing that network-level monitors can enforce realistic non-trivial protocols.