Amir R. Khakpour and Alex Liu
January, 2009
Quantifying static network reachability is useful in many aspects of network management: troubleshooting, maintenance, design, security auditing, etc. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a suite of algorithms for quantifying reachability based on the static configuration (mainly ACLs) of a network. We also present a network reachability model that considers connectionless and connection-oriented transport protocols, stateless and stateful routers/firewalls, static and dynamic NAT, PAT, etc. We implemented the algorithms in our network reachability monitoring tool called Quarnet and conducted experiments on a university network. Although computing static network reachability is expensive in nature, the experimental results show that Quarnet is efficient enough to be used in practice.
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