A fault injection description language for compiler-based SFI tools

Summary form only given. Software Fault Injection (SFI) techniques have a pivotal role in evaluating the dependability properties of a software system. Evaluating the dependability of software system against a multiple fault scenario is challenging for two reasons. The first challenge is combinatorial explosion of multiple failure modes when dealing with different attributes of a fault model to create a fault scenario. The second challenge is that, due to the increasing complexity of software systems, the advent of new types of failure modes (residual software bugs) is inevitable. These necessitate SFI tools that are programmable and easily extensible. This paper proposes FIDL¹, which stands for fault injection description language, that allows compiler-based fault injection tools to be extended with new failure modes. FIDL is an Aspect-Oriented Programming language that dynamically weaves the failure modes into the code of the fault injector. We implement FIDL on the Soft-LLFI framework for fault injection. FIDL allows us to dynamically extend Soft-LLFI for supporting 39 new software failure modes. FIDL significantly reduces the complexity (compared to the C++ equivalent implementation) of fault models by up to 10x, while incurring 4-18% implementation overhead, which in turn increases execution time of the injector by at most 7% across programs.