With the rise of software complexity, software-related accidents represent a significant threat for computer-based systems. Software Fault Injection is a method to anticipate worst-case scenarios caused by faulty software through the deliberate injection of software faults. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art on Software Fault Injection to support researchers and practitioners in the selection of the approach that best fits their dependability assessment goals, and it discusses how these approaches have evolved to achieve fault representativeness, efficiency, and usability. The survey includes a description of relevant applications of Software Fault Injection in the context of fault-tolerant systems.

Assessing Dependability with Software Fault Injection: A Survey

Because of our present inability to produce error-free software, software fault tolerance is and will continue to be an important consideration in software systems. The root cause of software design errors is the complexity of the systems. Compounding the problems in building correct software is the difficulty in assessing the correctness of software for highly complex systems. After a brief overview of the software development processes, we note how hard-to-detect design faults are likely to be introduced during development and how software faults tend to be state-dependent and activated by particular input sequences. Although component reliability is an important quality measure for system level analysis, software reliability is hard to characterize and the use of post-verification reliability estimates remains a controversial issue. For some applications software safety is more important than reliability, and fault tolerance techniques used in those applications are aimed at preventing catastrophes. Single version software fault tolerance techniques discussed include system structuring and closure, atomic actions, inline fault detection, exception handling, and others. Multiversion techniques are based on the assumption that software built differently should fail differently and thus, if one of the redundant versions fails, it is expected that at least one of the other versions will provide an acceptable output. Recovery blocks, N-version programming, and other multiversion techniques are reviewed.

/pdf/software-fault-tolerance-a-tutorial-yut83cx3gj.pdf

Software Fault Tolerance: A Tutorial

When creating mission-critical distributed systems using off-the-shelf components, it is important to assess the dependability of not only the hardware, but the software as well. This paper proposes a way to test operating system dependability. The concept of response regions is presented as a way to visualize erroneous system behavior and gain insight into failure mechanisms. A 5-point "CRASH" (catastrophic, restart, abort, silent, hindering) scale is defined for grading the severity of robustness vulnerabilities encountered. Test results from five operating systems are analyzed for robustness vulnerabilities, and exhibit a range of dependability. Robustness benchmarking comparisons of this type may provide important information to both users and designers of off-the-shelf software for dependable systems.

/pdf/comparing-operating-systems-using-robustness-benchmarks-21g300i3hv.pdf

Comparing operating systems using robustness benchmarks

Operating 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.

/pdf/the-exception-handling-effectiveness-of-posix-operating-3qelz6xbqb.pdf

The exception handling effectiveness of POSIX operating systems

This paper presents a benchmark for dependable systems The benchmark consists of two metrics, number of catastrophic incidents and performance degradation, which are obtained by a tool that (1) generates synthetic workloads that produce a high level of CPU, memory, and I/O activity and (2) injects CPU, memory, and I/O faults according to an injection strategy The benchmark has been installed on two TMR-based prototype machines: TMR Prototype A and TMR Prototype B An implementation for a third prototype, is based on a duplex architecture, is in progress The results demonstrate the utility of the benchmark in comparing the system-level fault tolerance of these machines and in providing insight into their design In particular the benchmark shows that Prototype B suffers fewer catastrophic incidents than Prototype A under the same workload conditions and fault injection method However Prototype B also suffers more performance degradation in the presence of faults, which might be an important concern for time-critical applications

An approach towards benchmarking of fault-tolerant commercial systems

In commercial literature, the meaning of the term fault tolerant has become vague. We describe a system used to measure the robustness of a fault tolerant aerospace system developed at IBM, present the data collected during the project, and report conclusions and areas for future work. >

Measuring robustness of a fault tolerant aerospace system

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Measuring robustness of a fault tolerant aerospace system