A Connection-Based Signature Approach for Control Flow Error Detection

Abstract

Control Flow Errors (CFEs) are major impairments of software system correctness. These CFEs can be caused by operational faults with respect to the execution environment of a software system. Several techniques are proposed to monitor the control flow using signature-based approaches. These techniques partition a software program into branch-free blocks and assign a unique signature for each block. They detect CFEs by comparing the runtime signatures of these blocks with pre-computed signatures based on the program Control Flow Graph (CFG). Unfortunately, branch-free block partitioning does not completely include all the program connections. Consequently, these techniques may fail to detect some invalid transitions due to lack of signatures associated with those missing connections. In this paper, we propose a connection-based signature approach for CFE detection. We first describe our connection-based signature structure in which we partition the program components into Connection Implementation Blocks (CIBs). Each CIB is associated with a Connection-based CFG (CCFG) to represent the control structure of its code segment. We present our control flow monitor structure and CFE checking algorithm using these CCFGs. The error detection approach is evaluated using PostgreSQL open-source database. The results show that this technique is capable of detecting CFEs in different software versions with variable numbers of randomly injected faults.