Robustness Testing of the Windows DDK

Mendonça, M.H.; Neves, Nuno

doi:10.1109/dsn.2007.85

Cited by 24 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…In [25] a study on the robustness properties of Windows device drivers is presented. Recent OS kernels tend to become thinner by delegating capacities on device drivers (which currently represent a substantial part of the OS code), and a large part of system crashes can be attributed to these device drivers because of residual software bugs.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent OS kernels tend to become thinner by delegating capacities on device drivers (which currently represent a substantial part of the OS code), and a large part of system crashes can be attributed to these device drivers because of residual software bugs. The evaluation presented in [25], focusing on the robustness properties of Windows (XP, Server 2003, and Vista), concluded that, in general, the tested OS versions appear to be vulnerable, as some of the injected faults caused system crashes or hangs, which highlights the importance of robustness testing.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A robustness testing approach for SOAP Web services

Laranjeiro

Vieira

Madeira

2012

J Internet Serv Appl

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The use of Web services in enterprise applications is quickly increasing. In a Web services environment, providers supply a set of services for consumers. However, although Web services are being used in business-critical environments, there are no practical means to test or compare their robustness to invalid and malicious inputs. In fact, client applications are typically developed with the assumption that the services being used are robust, which is not always the case. Robustness failures in such environments are particularly dangerous, as they may originate vulnerabilities that can be maliciously exploited, with severe consequences for the systems under attack. This paper addresses the problem of robustness testing in Web services environments. The proposed approach is based on a set of robustness tests (including both malicious and non-malicious invalid call parameters) that is used to discover programming and design errors. This approach, useful for both service providers and consumers, is demonstrated by two sets of experiments, showing, respectively, the use of Web services Robustness testing from the consumer and the provider points of view. The experiments comprise the robustness testing of 1,204 Web service operations publicly available in the Internet and of 29 home-implemented services, including two different implementations of the Web services specified by the standard TPC-App performance benchmark. Results show that many Web services are deployed with critical robustness N. Laranjeiro · M. Vieira (B) · H. Madeira DEI/CISUC, University of Coimbra, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal e-mail: mvieira@dei.uc.pt N. Laranjeiro e-mail: cnl@dei.uc.pt H. Madeira e-mail: henrique@dei.uc.pt problems and that robustness testing is an effective approach to improve services quality.

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Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A robustness testing approach for SOAP Web services

Laranjeiro

Vieira

Madeira

2012

J Internet Serv Appl

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“…With hundreds of devices attached to each ordinary computing system (about 250 in a Windows XP or Vista installation [1]) the drivers' code represents a significant share of the total OS code. In Linux, for instance, about 70% of the total lines of code belongs to DDs [2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Execution Path Profiling for OS Device Drivers: Viability and Methodology

Sârbu

Johansson

Suri

2008

Service Availability

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Abstract. Operating Systems (OSs) mediate across the hardware and software applications, leading to overall system service provision, but often sacrifice service robustness while favoring increasing feature richness and peripheral support. The OS interface to peripherals is implemented by components termed as Device Drivers (DDs). Unfortunately, despite extensive testing, DDs continue to constitute the prominent cause of system service failures. To find DD's weakness areas, this paper proposes a novel technique for profiling kernel mode DDs execution paths. Such profiles highlight the frequently used parts of a driver for a workload, helping identify redundant tests. The communication interfaces between the OS and DDs are simultaneously monitored, revealing the kernel functions invoked at runtime and the followed code paths. To highlight execution hotspots, a cluster analysis scheme using string similarity metrics is proposed to distribute the code paths into equivalence classes, reflecting the occurrence weights of both kernel functions and code paths.

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“…Nevertheless, most system administrators, users, and programmers still view them as an obscure and complex section of the operating system, which in part can be explained due to the DD necessity of addressing low level hardware details and OS internals. In the past, DD misbehavior has been pointed out as a prime cause for system crashes [3], and some researchers have showed that faults in DD can have a strong impact in the overall system dependability [4,5,6,7]. The recognized complexity associated with DD is aggravated as most vendors do not release openly the code, or even the hardware specifications.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intercept: Profiling Windows Network Device Drivers

Mendonça¹,

Neves²

2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Device drivers account for a substantial part of the operating system (OS), since they implement the code that interfaces the components connected to a computer system. Unfortunately, in the large majority of cases, hardware vendors do not release their code, making the analysis of failures attributed to device drivers extremely difficult. Although several instrumentation tools exist, most of them are useless to study device drivers as they work at user level. This paper presents Intercept, a tool that profiles Windows Device Drivers (WDD) and logs the driver interactions with the OS core at function level. The tool helps to understand how a WDD works and can provide support for several activities, such as debugging, robustness testing, or reverse engineering. Experiments using Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth device drivers show that Intercept is able to record function calls, parameters and return values, with small overheads even when the device driver under test is subject to a heavy workload.

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Robustness Testing of the Windows DDK

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 24 publications

References 19 publications

A robustness testing approach for SOAP Web services

A robustness testing approach for SOAP Web services

Execution Path Profiling for OS Device Drivers: Viability and Methodology

Intercept: Profiling Windows Network Device Drivers

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