Publications

2025

• David Basin, Nate Foster, Kenneth McMillan, Kedar Namjoshi, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Jonathan Smith, Pamela Zave, Lenore Zuck
  It Takes a Village: Bridging the Gaps between Current and Formal Specifications for Protocols
  CACM, August 2025
  PDF
• Charly Castes, François Costa, Neelu Kalani, Timothy Roscoe, Nate Foster, Thomas Bourgeat, Edouard Bugnion
  The Design and Implementation of a Virtual Firmware Monitor
  SOSP, October 2025
  PDF
• Charly Castes, François Costa, Nate Foster, Thomas Bourgeat, Edouard Bugnion
  Lightweight Hypervisor Verification: Putting the Hardware Burger on a Diet
  HotOS, May 2025
  PDF
• Jules Jacobs, Nate Foster, Tobias Kappé, Dexter Kozen, Lily Saada, Alexandra Silva, Jana Wagemaker
  StacKAT: Infinite State Network Verification
  PACMPL (PLDI), June 2025
  PDF
• Mark Moeller, Tiago Ferreira, Thomas Lu, Nate Foster, Alexandra Silva
  Active Learning of Symbolic NetKAT Automata
  PACMPL (PLDI), June 2025
  PDF

2024

• Andy Myers, Brian Nigito, Nate Foster
  Network Design Considerations for Trading Systems
  HotNets, November 2024
  PDFSlides
• Eric Campbell, Hossein Hojjat, Nate Foster
  Computing Precise Control Interface Specifications
  PACMPL (OOPSLA 2), October 2024
  PDFSlides
• Mark Moeller, Jules Jacobs, Oliver Bélanger, David Darais, Cole Schlesinger, Steffen Smolka, Nate Foster, Alexandra Silva
  KATch: A Fast Symbolic Verifier for NetKAT
  PACMPL (PLDI), June 2024
  PDFSlides

2023

• Mark Moeller, Thomas Wiener, Alaia Solko-Brelin, Caleb Koch, Nate Foster, Alexandra Silva
  Automata Learning with an Incomplete Teacher
  ECOOP, July 2023
  PDFSlides
• Anshuman Mohan, Yunhe Liu, Nate Foster, Tobias Kappé, Dexter Kozen
  Formal Abstractions for Packet Scheduling
  OOPSLA, October 2023 ★ Distinguished paper award
  PDFSlides
• Fabian Ruffy, Jed Liu, Prathima Kotikalapudi, Vojtech Havel, Hanneli Tavante, Rob Sherwood, Vladyslav Dubina, Volodymyr Peschanenko, Anirudh Sivaraman, Nate Foster
  P4Testgen: An Extensible Test Oracle For P4-16
  SIGCOMM, September 2023
  PDF
• Sundararajan Renganathan, Benny Rubin, Hyojoon Kim, Pier Luigi Ventre, Carmelo Cascone, Daniele Moro, Charles Chan, Nick McKeown, Nate Foster
  Hydra: Effective Runtime Network Verification
  SIGCOMM, September 2023
  PDF
• Rudy Peterson, Eric Campbell, John Chen, Natalie Isak, Calvin Shyu, Ryan Doenges, Parisa Ataei, Nate Foster
  P4Cub: A Little Language for Big Routers
  CPP, January 2023
  PDF

2022

• Yunhe Liu, Nate Foster, Fred Schneider
  Causal Network Telemetry
  EuroP4, December 2022
  PDF
• Shrutarshi Basi, Nate Foster, James Grimmelman, James Grimmelman, Shan Parikh, Ryan Richardson
  A Programming Language for Future Interests
  YJoLT, November 2022
  PDF
• Ryan Donges, Tobias Kappé, John Sarracino, Nate Foster, Greg Morrisett
  Leapfrog: Certified Equivalence for Protocol Parsers
  PLDI, June 2022
  PDF
• Matthias Eichholz, Eric Campbell, Matthias Krebs, Nate Foster, Mira Mezini
  Dependently-Typed Data Plane Programming
  POPL, January 2022
  PDF

2021

• Eric Hayden Campbell, William T. Hallahan, Priya Srikumar, Carmelo Cascone, Jed Liu, Vignesh Ramamurthy, Hossein Hojjat, Ruzica Piskac, Robert Soulé, Nate Foster
  Avenir: Managing Data Plane Diversity with Control Plane Synthesis
  USENIX NSDI, April 2021
  PDFCodeSlides
• Ryan Doenges, Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo, Santiago Bautista, Alexander Chang, Newton Ni, Samwise Parkinson, Rudy Peterson, Alaia Solko-Breslin, Amanda Xu, Nate Foster
  Petr4: Formal Foundations for P4 Data Planes
  PACM (POPL), January 2021
  PDFCode

2020

• Nate Foster, Nick McKeown, Jennifer Rexford, Guru Parulkar, Larry Peterson, Oguz Sunay
  Using Deep Programmability to Put Network Owners in Control
  SIGCOMM CCR, October 2020
  PDF
• Theo Jepsen, Ali Fattaholmanan, Masoud Moshref, Nate Foster, Antonio Carzaniga, Robert Soule
  Forwarding and Routing with Packet Subscriptions
  CoNEXT, December 2020 ★ Best paper award
  PDF
• Hardik Soni, Myriana Rifai, Praveen Kumar, Ryan Doenges, Nate Foster
  Composing Dataplane Programs with μP4
  SIGCOMM, August 2020
  PDF
• Steffen Smolka, Nate Foster, Justin Hsu, Tobias Kappé, Dexter Kozen, Alexandra Silva
  Guarded Kleene Algebra with Tests: Verification of Uninterpreted Programs in Nearly Linear Time
  PACMPL (POPL), January 2020 ★ Distinguished paper award
  PDF

2019

• Christian Skalka, John Ring, David Darias, Minseok Kwon, Sahil Gupta, Kyle Diller, Steffen Smolka, Nate Foster
  Proof Carrying Network Code
  CCS, November 2019
  PDF
• Eugene Bagdasaryan, Griffin Berlstein, Jason Waterman, Eleanor Birrell, Nate Foster, Fred B. Schneider, Deborah Estrin
  Ancile: Enhancing Privacy for Ubiquitous Computing with Use-Based Privacy
  WPES, November 2019
  PDF
• Matthias Eichholz, Eric Campbell, Nate Foster, Guido Salvaneschi, Mira Mezini
  How to Avoid Making a Billion-Dollar Mistake: Type-Safe Data Plane Programming with SafeP4
  ECOOP, July 2019
  PDF
• Jonathan DiLorenzo, Kathryn Mancini, Kathleen Fisher, Nate Foster
  TxForest: A DSL for Concurrent Data Stores
  APLAS, December 2019
  PDF
• Praveen Kumar, Nandita Dukkipati, Nathan Lewis, Yi Cui, Yaogong Wang, Chonggang Li, Valas Valancius, Jake Adriaens, Steve Gribble, Nate Foster, Amin Vahdat
  PicNIC: Predictable Virtualized NIC
  SIGCOMM, August 2019 ★ Best student paper award
  PDF
• Steffen Smolka, Praveen Kumar, Nate Foster, Justin Hsu, Dexter Kozen, Alexandra Silva
  Scalable Verification of Probabilistic Networks
  PLDI, June 2019
  PDF
• Tom Magrino, Jed Liu, Nate Foster, Johannes Gehrke, Andrew C. Myers
  Efficient, Consistent Distributed Computation with Predictive Treaties
  EuroSys, March 2019
  PDF

2018

• Theo Jepsen, Masoud Moshref, Antonio Carzaniga, Nate Foster, Robert Soule
  Packet Subscriptions for Programmable ASICs
  HotNets, November 2018
  PDF
• Jed Liu, William Hallahan, Cole Schlesinger, Milad Sharif, Jeongkeun Lee, Robert Soule, Han Wang, Cualin Cacscaval, Nick McKeown, Nate Foster
  p4v: Practical Verification for Programmable Data Planes
  SIGCOMM, August 2018
  PDF
• Theo Jepsen, Masoud Moshref, Antonio Carzaniga, Nate Foster, Robert Soule
  Life in the Fast Lane: A Line-Rate Linear Road
  SOSR, March 2018
  PDF
• Praveen Kumar, Chris Yu, Yang Yuan, Nate Foster, Robert Kleinberg, Robert Soule
  YATES: Rapid Prototyping for Traffic Engineering Systems
  SOSR, March 2018
  PDF
• Praveen Kumar, Yang Yuan, Chris Yu, Nate Foster, Robert Kleinberg, Petr Lapukhov, Chiun Lin Lim, Robert Soule
  Semi-Oblivious Traffic Engineering: The Road Not Taken
  NSDI, April 2018
  PDF
• Xin Jin, Xiaozhou Li, Haoyu Zhang, Nate Foster, Jeongkeun Lee, Robert Soule, Changhoon Kim, Ion Stoica
  NetChain: Scale-Free Sub-RTT Coordination
  NSDI, April 2018
  PDF

2017

• Xin Jin, Xiaozhou Li, Haoyu Zhang, Robert Soule, Jeongkeun Lee, Nate Foster, Changhoon Kim, Ion Stoica
  NetCache: Balancing Key-Value Stores with Fast In-Network Caching
  SOSP, October 2017
  PDF
• Shrutarshi Basu, Nate Foster, Hossein Hojjat, Paparao Palacharla, Christian Skalka, Xi Wang
  Life on the Edge: Unraveling Policies into Configurations
  ANCS, May 2017
  PDF
• Han Wang, Robert Soulé, Huynh Tu Dang, Ki Suh Lee, Vishal Shrivastav, Nate Foster, Hakim Weatherspoon
  P4FPGA: A Rapid Prototyping Framework for P4
  SOSR, April 2017
  PDF
• Steffen Smolka, Praveen Kumar, Nate Foster, Dexter Kozen, Alexandra Silva
  Cantor Meets Scott: Semantic Foundations for Probabilistic Networks
  POPL, January 2017
  PDF

2016

• Jonathan DiLorenzo, Richard Zhang, Erin Menzies, Kathleen Fisher, Nate Foster
  Incremental Forest: A DSL for Efficiently Managing Filestores
  ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Languages, Systems, and Applications (OOPSLA), Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 2016
  PDF
• Hossein Hojjat, Phillip Reummer, Jedidiah McClurg, Pavol Cerny, Nate Foster
  Optimizing Horn Solvers for Network Repair
  FMCAD, October 2016
  PDF
• Pavol Cerny, Nate Foster, Nilesh Jagnik, Jedidiah McClurg
  Consistent Network Updates in Polynomial Time
  DISC, September 2016
  PDF
• Jedidiah McClurg, Hossein Hojjat, Nate Foster, Pavol Cerny
  Event-Driven Network Programming
  PLDI, June 2016
  PDF
• Karla Saur, Joseph Collard, Nate Foster, Arjun Guha, Laurent Vanbever, Michael Hicks
  Safe and Flexible Controller Upgrades for SDNs
  SOSR, March 2016
  PDF
• Haoxian Chen, Nate Foster, Jake Silverman, Michael Whittaker, Brandon Zhang, Rene Zhang
  Felix: Implementing Traffic Measurement on End Hosts Using Program Analysis
  SOSR, March 2016
  PDF
• Nate Foster, Dexter Kozen, Konstantinos Mamouras, Mark Reitblatt, Alexandra Silva
  Probabilistic NetKAT
  ESOP, April 2016
  PDF

2015

• Nikolaj Bjorner, Nate Foster, Philip Brighten Godfrey, Pamela Zave
  Formal Foundations for Networking (Dagstuhl Seminar 15071)
  Dagstuhl Reports 2015
  PDF
• Steffen Smolka, Spiridon Eliopoulos, Nate Foster, Arjun Guha
  A Fast Compiler for NetKAT
  ICFP, September 2015
  PDF
• Sudip Roy, Lucja Kot, Gabriel Bender, Bailu Ding, Hossein Hojjat, Christoph Koch, Nate Foster, Johannes Gehrke
  The Homeostasis Protocol: Avoiding Transaction Coordination Through Program Analysis
  SIGMOD, June 2015
  PDF
• Jedidiah McClurg, Hossein Hojjat, Pavol Cerny, Nate Foster
  Efficient Synthesis of Network Updates
  PLDI, June 2015
  PDF
• Nate Foster, Dexter Kozen, Mae Milano, Alexandra Silva, Laure Thompson
  A Coalgebraic Decision Procedure for NetKAT
  POPL, January 2015
  PDF

2014

• Robert Soul'e, Shrutarshi Basu, Parisa Jalili Marandi, Fernando Pedone, Robert Kleinberg, Emin Gun Sirer, Nate Foster
  Merlin: A Language for Provisioning Network Resources
  CoNEXT, December 2014
  PDF
• Martin Casado, Nate Foster, Arjun Guha
  Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks
  CACM, October 2014
• Carolyn Jane Anderson, Nate Foster, Arjun Guha, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin, Dexter Kozen, Cole Schlesinger, David Walker
  NetKAT: Semantic Foundations for Networks
  POPL, January 2014
  PDF

2013

• Robert Soule, Shrutarshi Basu, Robert Kleinberg, Emin Gun Sirer, Nate Foster
  Managing the Network with Merlin
  HotNets, November 2013
  PDF
• Andrew Noyes, Todd Warszawski, Pavol Cerny, Nate Foster
  Toward Synthesis of Network Updates
  SYNT Workshop, July 2013
  PDF
• Laurent Vanbever, Joshua Reich, Theophilus Benson, Nate Foster, Jennifer Rexford
  HotSwap: Correct and Efficient Controller Upgrades for Software-Defined Networks
  HotSDN, August 2013
  PDF
• Mark Reitblatt, Marco Canini, Arjun Guha, Nate Foster
  FatTire: Declarative Fault Tolerance for Software-Defined Networks
  HotSDN, August 2013
  PDF
• Arjun Guha, Mark Reitblatt, Nate Foster
  Machine-Verified Network Controllers
  PLDI, June 2013
  PDF
• Christopher Monsanto, Joshua Reich, Nate Foster, Jennifer Rexford, David Walker
  Composing Software Defined Networks
  NSDI, April 2013 ★ Community award
  PDF
• Nate Foster, Arjun Guha, Mark Reitblatt, Alec Story, Michael J. Freedman, Naga Praveen Katta, Christopher Monsanto, Joshua Reich, Jennifer Rexford, Cole Schlesinger, David Walker, Rob Harrison
  Languages for software-defined networks
  IEEE Communications Magazine 2013
  PDF

2012

• Mark Reitblatt, Nate Foster, Jennifer Rexford, Cole Schlesinger, David Walker
  Abstractions for Network Update
  SIGCOMM, August 2012
  PDF
• Stephen Gutz, Alec Story, Cole Schlesinger, Nate Foster
  Splendid Isolation: A Slice Abstraction for Software-Defined Networks
  HotSDN, August 2012
  PDF
• Nate Foster, Kazutaka Matsuda, Janis Voigtlander
  Three Complementary Approaches to Bidirectional Programming
  Spring School on Generic and Indexed Programming (SSGIP), May 2012
  PDF
• Christopher Monsanto, Nate Foster, Rob Harrison, David Walker
  A Compiler and Run-time System for Network Programs
  POPL, January 2012
  PDF
• Stephen Magill, Christopher M. Hayden, Michael Hicks, Nate Foster, Jeffrey S. Foster
  Specifying and Verifying the Correctness of Dynamic Software Updates
  VSTTE, January 2012
  PDF
• Nate Foster, Michael J. Freedman, Rob Harrison, Christopher Monsanto, Mark Reitblatt, Jennifer Rexford, Alec Story, David Walker
  Language Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks
  LADA Workshop, January 2012
  PDF
• Lonnie Princehouse, Nate Foster, Ken Birman
  A Pairwise Abstraction for Round-Based Protocols
  LADA Workshop, January 2012
  PDF

2011

• Mark Reitblatt, Nate Foster, Jennifer Rexford, David Walker
  Consistent Updates for Software-Defined Networks: Change You Can Believe In!
  HotNets, November 2011
  PDF
• Nate Foster, Rob Harrison, Michael J. Freedman, Christopher Monsanto, Jennifer Rexford, Alec Story, David Walker
  Frenetic: A Network Programming Language
  ICFP, September 2011 ★ Most influential paper from ICFP 2011
  PDFSlides
• Kathleen Fisher, Nate Foster, David Walker, Kenny Q. Zhu
  Forest: A Language and Toolkit for Programming With Filestores
  ICFP, September 2011
  PDF

2010

• Nate Foster, Rob Harrison, Matthew L. Meola, Michael J. Freedman, Jennifer Rexford, David Walker
  Frenetic: A High-Level Langauge for OpenFlow Networks
  PRESTO Workshop, November 2010
  PDFSlides
• Davi M. J. Barbosa, Julien Cretin, Nate Foster, Michael Greenberg, Benjamin C. Pierce
  Matching Lenses: Alignment and View Update
  ICFP, September 2010
  PDFSlides

2009

• John Nathan Foster
  Bidirectional Programming Languages
  PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, December 2009
  PDFSlides
• James Cheney, Stephen Chong, Nate Foster, Margo Seltzer, Stijn Vansummeren
  Provenance: A Future History
  Onward!, October 2009
  PDF
• Krzysztof Czarnecki, J. Nathan Foster, Zhenjiang Hu, Ralf Lammel, Andy Schurr, James F. Terwilliger
  Bidirectional Transformations: A Cross-Discipline Perspective. GRACE Meeting notes, state of the art, and outlook
  ICMT, June 2009
  PDF
• J. Nathan Foster, Benjamin C. Pierce, Steve Zdancewic
  Updatable Security Views
  CSF, July 2009
  PDFSlides

2008

• J. Nathan Foster, Todd J. Green, Val Tannen
  Annotated XML: Queries and Provenance
  PODS, June 2008
  PDF
• Aaron Bohannon, J. Nathan Foster, Benjamin C. Pierce, Alexandre Pilkiewicz, Alan Schmitt
  Boomerang: Resourceful Lenses for String Data
  POPL, January 2008
  PDFSlides
• J. Nathan Foster, Alexandre Pilkiewcz, Benjamin C. Pierce
  Quotient Lenses
  ICFP, September 2008
  PDFSlides
• Mary Fernandez, Kathleen Fisher, J. Nathan Foster, Michael Greenberg, Yitzhak Mandelbaum
  A Generic Programming Toolkit for PADS/ML: First-Class Upgrades for Third-Party Developers
  PADL, January 2008
  PDF
• J. Nathan Foster, Ravi Konuru, Jerome Simeon, Lionel Villard
  An Algebraic Approach to XQuery View Maintenance
  PLAN-X, January 2008
  Slides
• J. Nathan Foster, Benjamin C. Pierce
  Boomerang Programmer's Manual
  2008
  PDF

2007

• J. Nathan Foster, Grigoris Karvounarakis
  Provenance and Data Synchronization
  IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, December 2007
• J. Nathan Foster, Benjamin C. Pierce, Alan Schmitt
  A Logic Your Typechecker Can Count On: Unordered Tree Types in Practice
  PLAN-X, January 2007
  PDFSlides
• J. Nathan Foster, Michael B. Greenwald, Christian Kirkegaard, Benjamin C. Pierce, Alan Schmitt
  Exploiting Schemas in Data Synchronization
  Journal of Computer and System Sciences, June 2007
  PDFSlides
• J. Nathan Foster, Michael B. Greenwald, Jonathan T. Moore, Benjamin C. Pierce, Alan Schmitt
  Combinators for Bidirectional Tree Transformations: A Linguistic Approach to the View Update Problem
  TOPLAS, May 2007
  PDFSlides

2006

• J. Nathan Foster
  Actions Louder Than Words? MSO-Definable Transductions
  Written Preliminary Exam II, UPenn CIS, November 2006
• J. Nathan Foster, Dimitrios Vytiniotis
  A Theory of Featherweight Java in Isabelle/HOL
  Archive of Formal Proofs, April 2006
  PDF
• J. Nathan Foster, Benjamin C. Pierce, Alan Schmitt
  Harmony Programmer's Manual
  2006
  PDF

2005

• J. Nathan Foster
  Harmony: A Generic Synchronization Framework for Heterogeneous, Replicated Data
  , October 2005
  PDF
• J. Nathan Foster
  Exploiting Schemas in Data Synchronization
  , June 2005
  Slides
• Brian E. Aydemir, Aaron Bohannon, Matthew Fairbairn, J. Nathan Foster, Benjamin C. Pierce, Peter Sewell, Dimitrios Vytiniotis, Geoffrey Washburn, Stephanie Weirich, Steve Zdancewic
  Mechanized Metatheory for the Masses: The POPLmark Challenge
  TPHOLS, August 2005
  PDF
• J. Nathan Foster, Michael B. Greenwald, Jonathan T. Moore, Benjamin C. Pierce, Alan Schmitt
  Combinators for Bidirectional Tree Transformations: A Linguistic Approach to the View Update Problem
  POPL, Jan 2005 ★ Most influential paper from POPL 2005
  PDFSlides

2004

• Kim B. Bruce, J. Nathan Foster
  LOOJ: Weaving LOOM into Java
  ECOOP, June 2004
  PDFSlides

2003

• J. Nathan Foster
  Contexts, Boxes, and Names, Oh My!
  , November 2003
• J N Foster
  Indexicals and Belief Reports
  MPhil Thesis, Cambridge History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, June 2003
  PDF

2002

• John N Foster
  Model Checking for a Functional Hardware Description Language
  Tripos Dissertation, Cambridge Computer Laboratory, June 2002
  PDF

2001

• John N Foster
  Rupiah: Towards an Expressive Static Type System for Java
  Senior Honors Thesis, Williams Computer Science, June 2001
  PDF