FIDL: A Fault Injection Description Language for Compiler-Based SFI Tools

Abstract

Software Fault Injection (SFI) techniques play a pivotal role in evaluating the dependability properties of a software system. Evaluating the dependability of software system against multiple fault scenarios is challenging, due to the combinatorial explosion and the advent of new fault models. These necessitate SFI tools that are programmable and easily extensible. This paper proposes FIDL, which stands for fault injection description language, which allows compiler-based fault injection tools to be extended with new fault models. FIDL is an Aspect-Oriented Programming language that dynamically weaves the fault models into the code of the fault injector. We implement FIDL using the LLFI fault injection framework and measure its overheads. We find that FIDL significantly reduces the complexity of fault models by 10x on average, while incurring 4–18% implementation overhead, which in turn increases the execution time of the injector by at most 7 % across five programs.