Fault injection experiments using FIAT

Barton, James H.; Czeck, E.W.; Segall, Zary; Siewiorek, D.P.

doi:10.1109/12.54853

Cited by 195 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Ballista builds upon more than fifteen years of fault injection work at Carnegie Mellon University, including [30], [6], [2], [31], [8], and [9], and makes the contribution of attaining scalability for cost-effective application to a reasonably large API. In software testing terms, Ballista is performing tests for responses to exceptional input conditions (sometimes called ªdirtyº tests, which involve exceptional situations, as opposed to ªcleanº tests of correct functionality in normal situations).…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The FIAT system [2] uses probes placed by the programmer to alter the binary process image in memory during execution. The FERRARI system [18] is similar in intent to FIAT, but uses software traps in a manner similar to debugger break-points to permit emulation of specific system-level hardware faults (e.g., data address lines, condition codes).…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The exception handling effectiveness of POSIX operating systems

Koopman

DeVale

2000

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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AbstractÐOperating systems form a foundation for robust application software, making it important to understand how effective they are at handling exceptional conditions. The Ballista testing system was used to characterize the handling of exceptional input parameter values for up to 233 POSIX functions and system calls on each of 15 widely used operating system (OS) implementations. This identified ways to crash systems with a single call, ways to cause task hangs within OS code, ways to cause abnormal task termination within OS and library code, failures to implement defined POSIX functionality, and failures to report unsuccessful operations. Overall, only 55 percent to 76 percent of the exceptional tests performed generated error codes, depending on the operating system being tested. Approximately 6 percent to 19 percent of tests failed to generate any indication of error despite exceptional inputs. Approximately 1 percent to 3 percent of tests revealed failures to implement defined POSIX functionality for unusual, but specified, situations. Between 18 percent and 33 percent of exceptional tests caused the abnormal termination of an OS system call or library function, and five systems were completely crashed by individual system calls with exceptional parameter values. The most prevalent sources of these robustness failures were illegal pointer values, numeric overflows, and end-of-file overruns. There is significant opportunity for improving exception handling within OS calls and especially within C library functions. However, the role of signals vs. error return codes is both controversial and the source of divergent implementation philosophies, forming a potential barrier to writing portable, robust applications.

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Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The exception handling effectiveness of POSIX operating systems

Koopman

DeVale

2000

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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“…F I A T [9] is designed for SunOS in exploring the behaviours of kernel fault propagation and the abnormal inputs consist of the following three categories: 1) zero-a-byte fault, set any eight consecutive bits in a 32-bits word as zeroes; 2) set-a-byte fault, set any eight consecutive bits in a 32-bits word as random values; 3) two-bits compensating fault, set any two bits in a 32-bits word as opposite values. The test results are classified in four categories ("crash", "task hang", "abnormal output" and "no error").…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing an Efficient and Extensible Robustness Benchmark of a Real-Time Operating System

Zhou

Zhu²,

Cai

2015

Cybernetics and Information Technologies

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“…Segal et al [21,3] invented Fiat, an early validation system based on fault injection. Their fault model simulates hardware fault (bit changes in memory).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exception handling analysis and transformation using fault injection: Study of resilience against unanticipated exceptions

Cornu¹,

Seinturier²,

Monperrus³

2015

Information and Software Technology

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Context: In software, there are the error cases that are anticipated at specification and design time, those encountered at development and testing time, and those that were never anticipated before happening in production. Is it possible to learn from the anticipated errors during design to analyze and improve the resilience against the unanticipated ones in production?Objective: In this paper, we aim at analyzing and improving how software handles unanticipated exceptions. The first objective is to set up contracts about exception handling and a way to assess them automatically. The second one is to improve the resilience capabilities of software by transforming the source code. Method:We devise an algorithm, called short-circuit testing, which injects exceptions during test suite execution so as to simulate unanticipated errors. It is a kind of fault-injection techniques dedicated to exceptionhandling. This algorithm collects data that is used for verifying two formal contracts that capture two resilience properties w.r.t. exceptions: the source-independence and pure-resilience contracts. Then we propose a code modification technique, called "catch-stretching" which allows error-recovery code (of the form of catch blocks) to be more resilient. Results:Our evaluation is performed on 9 open-source software applications and consists in analyzing 241 catch blocks executed during test suite execution. Our results show that 101/214 of them (47%) expose resilience properties as defined by our exception contracts and that 84/214 of them (39%) can be transformed to be more resilient. Conclusion:Our work shows that it is possible to reason on software resilience by injecting exceptions during test suite execution. The collected information allows us to apply one source code transformation that improves the resilience against unanticipated exceptions. This works best if the test suite exercises the exceptional programming language constructs in many different scenarios.

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Fault injection experiments using FIAT

Cited by 195 publications

References 8 publications

The exception handling effectiveness of POSIX operating systems

The exception handling effectiveness of POSIX operating systems

Designing an Efficient and Extensible Robustness Benchmark of a Real-Time Operating System

Exception handling analysis and transformation using fault injection: Study of resilience against unanticipated exceptions

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