Analyzing the Effects of Bugs on Software Interfaces

Natella, R. and Winter, S. and Cotroneo, D. and Suri, Neeraj (2020) Analyzing the Effects of Bugs on Software Interfaces. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 46 (3). pp. 280-301. ISSN 0098-5589

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Abstract

Critical systems that integrate software components (e.g., from third-parties) need to address the risk of residual software defects in these components. Software fault injection is an experimental solution to gauge such risk. Many error models have been proposed for emulating faulty components, such as by injecting error codes and exceptions, or by corrupting data with bit-flips, boundary values, and random values. Even if these error models have been able to find breaches in fragile systems, it is unclear whether these errors are in fact representative of software faults. To pursue this open question, we propose a methodology to analyze how software faults in $C/C_{++}$ software components turn into errors at components' interfaces (interface error propagation), and present an experimental analysis on what, where, and when to inject interface errors. The results point out that the traditional error models, as used so far, do not accurately emulate software faults, but that richer interface errors need to be injected, by: injecting both fail-stop behaviors and data corruptions; targeting larger amounts of corrupted data structures; emulating silent data corruptions not signaled by the component; combining bit-flips, boundary values, and data perturbations. IEEE

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/1700/1712
Subjects:
?? COMPUTER BUGSDEPENDABILITYERROR MODELSERROR PROPAGATIONFAULT INJECTIONFAULT TOLERANCEPERTURBATION METHODSSOFTWARESOFTWARE COMPONENTSSOFTWARE FAULT TOLERANCETESTINGUNIFIED MODELING LANGUAGECOMPUTER SOFTWAREERRORSFAULT TOLERANT COMPUTER SYSTEMSPERTURBATION ??
ID Code:
137436
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
11 Oct 2019 15:05
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
16 Sep 2023 02:02