Deterministic Fault Injection of Distributed Systems

Abstract

. Ensuring that a system meets its prescribed specification is a growing challenge that confronts software developers and system engineers. Meeting this challenge is particularly important for distributed systems with strict dependability and timeliness constraints. This paper presents a technique, called script-driven probing and fault injection, for the evaluation and validation of dependable protocols. The proposed approach can be used to demonstrate three aspects of a target protocol: i) detection of design or implementation errors, ii) identification of violations of protocol specifications, and iii) insight into design decisions made by the implementors. To demonstrate the capabilities of this technique, the paper briefly describes a probing and fault injection tool, called the PFI tool, and several experiments on two protocols: the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) [4, 24] and the Group Membership Protocol (GMP) [19]. The tool can be used to delay, drop, reorder, duplicate, a..