# This file is protected by the VeriFlow Research License Agreement
# available at http://www.cs.illinois.edu/~khurshi1/projects/veriflow/veriflow-research-license-agreement.txt.
# A copy of this agreement is also included in this package.
#
# Copyright (c) 2012-2013 by
# The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
# All rights reserved.

VeriFlow - Real-Time Network Property Verifier
----------------------------------------------

This file contains information to compile, install and run the VeriFlow software.
Please note that this is an early evaluation version of VeriFlow. Therefore, there
can be bugs, and the user interface is not fully developed. This code has been tested
with Mininet and NOX version 0.9.1~full~beta. If you have any question, or face any
problem, then please contact us at [email protected].

System requirements
-------------------

VeriFlow can be compiled and run on any Linux distribution supporting C++, pthreads
and the make utility. The current code should compile without any error or warning
on 64-bit Linux systems.

Steps to use VeriFLow
---------------------

The following steps need to be followed to setup VeriFlow and test its functionality.

1. Compile VeriFlow.
2. Run VeriFlow in test mode.
3. Run VeriFlow in proxy mode.

The following paragraphs describe these steps in detail.

1. Compile VeriFlow
-------------------

The VeriFlow directory contains the VeriFlow source code files. Use the following 
commands to compile the code.

- cd VeriFlow
- make clean all

It will produce the binary executable file VeriFlow.

2. Run VeriFlow in test mode
----------------------------

Executing the VeriFlow binary without any command line argument runs it in test mode.
In this mode, VeriFlow executes the Test::testVerification() function present in Test.cpp.
Please go through this function to get a quick overview of how VeriFlow operates. This
function creates a small topology by specifying a set of rules, and then checks the
addition of a new rule. In this example, the egress gateway for a particular packet
header signature is denoted by a rule where the next hop points to the same location.
Use the following commands to run VeriFlow in test mode.

- cd VeriFlow
- ./VeriFlow

3. Run VeriFlow in proxy mode
-----------------------------

In this mode, VeriFlow will act as a proxy between an OpenFlow controller and the network.
It will intercept the rules that are sent by the controller, and check for loops and black holes.
We need to supply a set of command line arguments to VeriFlow to run it in proxy mode.
The command is shown below. You may need to update the PATH environment variable to include 
the VeriFlow build directory.

- VeriFlow <veriflow_port> <controller_address> <controller_port> <topology_file>

Here,
veriflow_port - is the port where VeriFlow listens for connections from network devices.
controller_address - is the address of the machine where the controller is running.
controller_port - is the port where the controller is listening for incoming connections.
topology_file - is a text file containing the topology of the network.

An example topology file named demo-topology-10-node.txt has been included in the package.
A python version of this topology file (demo-topology-10-node.py) is also provided that 
can be used to set up a Mininet network.

The following commands can be used to test VeriFlow with NOX and Mininet.

nox_core -i ptcp:5555 switch
VeriFlow 6633 127.0.0.1 5555 demo-topology-10-node.txt
sudo mn --custom demo-topology-10-node.py --topo customtopo --mac --switch ovsk --controller remote --ip 127.0.0.1 --port 6633

Please check the VeriFlow project webpage at 
http://www.cs.illinois.edu/~khurshi1/projects/veriflow/ for latest news and updates.