Paper Info
Title
Semi-automated protocol disambiguation and code generation
Abstract
ABSTRACTFor decades, Internet protocols have been specified using natural language. Given the ambiguity inherent in such text, it is not surprising that protocol implementations have long exhibited bugs. In this paper, we apply natural language processing (NLP) to effect semi-automated generation of protocol implementations from specification text. Our system, Sage, can uncover ambiguous or under-specified sentences in specifications; once these are clarified by the author of the protocol specification, Sage can generate protocol code automatically. Using Sage, we discover 5 instances of ambiguity and 6 instances of under-specification in the ICMP RFC; after fixing these, Sage is able to automatically generate code that interoperates perfectly with Linux implementations. We show that Sage generalizes to sections of BFD, IGMP, and NTP and identify additional conceptual components that Sage needs to support to generalize to complete, complex protocols like BGP and TCP.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3452296.3472910
COMM
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
natural language, protocol specifications
Conference
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jane Yen121.06
Tamás Lévai2142.52
Qinyuan Ye332.09
Xiang Ren488560.08
ramesh govindan5154302144.86
Barath Raghavan670.89