Hardware Auditing Service

Project Logistics:

• Mentors: Naved Ansari (naved001@bu.edu); Sahil Tikale (tikale.bu.edu)
• Min-Max team size: 3-5
• Expected project hours per week (per team member): 8 to 10
• Will the project be open source?: yes

Preferred Past Experience:

• Python - required
• Switches - Nice to have
• Knowledge of networking softwares - Nice to have
• REST API - Nice to have

Project Overview:

Background:

A increasingly new category of cloud service is Hardware as a Service (HaaS), where users of a cloud can elastically acquire physical rather than virtual computers.  Benefits include security (you don’t have to trust complicated virtualized stacks), performance, determinism (e.g., for performance experiments), and standing complex higher level services.  The MOC has developed the Hardware Isolation Layer (HIL) both as the basis for a HaaS offering, and to allow physical machines to be moved between different services of the cloud.  

HIL is a low-level tool that allows users to reserve physical machines and connecting them via isolated networks. It manages network switches to provide network isolation, and can control nodes using out-of-band management.   A system administrator identifies  to HIL information about the physical resources, such as;

• What machines are available
• What network interface they have
• Where those NICs are connected (what port on what switch).

Project Specifics:

The goal of this project is to develop a service that can query the switches on behalf of HIL users and ensure that HIL configuration is accurate and consistent with the actual state of switches.  The two driving use cases for this auditing service are:

1. To ensure that if someone manually modifies switch information the HIL database can be made aware of it.
2. To reduce the trust that the user needs to place in HIL; a user can go to the auditing service to ensure that a (possibly compromised) HIL service is providing the contracted for isolaiton.  

In addition, this service will also help with tracing, SLA maintenance of networks and

help us identify the network topology, eliminating the need of manually tracing network cables. It gives network engineers visibility into the IP, MAC, VLAN, status and availability of ports, and could become a valuable tool for system administrators and network engineers to troubleshoot networking in a data-center.

Tools we will be using/exploring for building this service:

• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
• Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)
• ping (ICMP)
• Nmap (Network Mapper)
• Any other switch specific tools