Robustness and Fault Injection for the Validation of Critical Systems

Authors

Abstract

Critical systems are nowadays being deployed as services or web applica- tions, and are being used to provide enterprise-level business-critical opera- tions. These systems are supported by complex middleware, which often links different systems, and where a failure can bring in disastrous consequences for both clients and service providers. In this chapter we present a toolset that can be used to evaluate the robustness of a given system, under the following two different perspectives: i) executing robustness tests against the service’s external interface (e.g., the interface with business clients) and also inner interfaces (e.g., the application-database interface); ii) emulating the presence of source code defects, on the service middleware, to understand how the presence of a defect can affect the robustness of the overall system. The toolset has been demonstrated on a set of web services, an Enterprise Resource Planning web application, and on the popular Apache HTTP server. Results show that the toolset can be easily used to disclose critical problems in web applications and to support middleware, helping developers in building and validating more reliable services.

Related Project

CECRIS – CErtification of CRItical Systems

Book Chapter

Certifications of Critical Systems – The CECRIS Experience, 12, pp. 247-274, River Publishers, September 2017