Injecting Inconsistent Values Caused by Interaction Faults for Experimental Dependability Evaluation

Abstract

Interaction faults caused by a flawed external system designed by a third party are a major issue faced by interconnected systems. Fault injection is a valuable tool for evaluating the dependability of such scenarios. Several types of errors caused by interaction faults may be injected by existing approaches, even though previous work focused on other types of faults, such as hardware and software faults. This is not the case of inconsistent values -data that is correctly received and syntactically correct, but inconsistent with what it should represent. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to inject inconsistent values caused by interaction faults, including hand-defined, random and semantically significant values. We also describe a simulation tool which implements the proposed mechanism to aid dependability evaluation in a system that uses the Universal Plug and Play standard to communicate.

Detecting Inconsistent Values Caused by Interaction Faults Using Automatically Located Implicit Redundancies

“…The messages received from the external sub-system can include 87 fields, most of them referring not to the flag value, but to information used by UPnP. The device runs over a simulated environment that includes a real implementation of UPnP, described in [9].…”