HILTI

Abstract

When developing networking systems such as firewalls, routers, and intrusion detection systems, one faces a striking gap between the ease with which one can often describe a desired analysis in high-level terms, and the tremendous amount of low-level implementation details that one must still grapple with to come to a robust solution. We present HILTI, a platform that bridges this divide by providing to application developers much of the low-level functionality, without tying it to a specific analysis structure. HILTI consists of two parts: (1) an abstract machine model that we tailor specifically to the networking domain, directly supporting the field's common abstractions and idioms in its instruction set; and (2) a compilation strategy for turning programs written for the abstract machine into optimized, natively executable code. We have developed a prototype of the HILTI compiler toolchain that fully implements the design's functionality, and ported exemplars of networking applications to the HILTI model to demonstrate the aptness of its abstractions. Our evaluation of HILTI's functionality and performance confirms its potential to become a powerful platform for future application development.