ORCHESTRA: a probing and fault injection environment for testing protocol implementations

Abstract

Ensuring that a distributed system meets its prescribed specification is a growing challenge that confronts software developers and system engineers. Meeting this challenge is particularly important for applications with strict dependability and/or timeliness constraints. We have developed a software fault injection tool, called ORCHESTRA, for testing dependability and timing properties of distributed protocols. ORCHESTRA is based on a simple yet powerful framework, called script-driven probing and fault injection. The emphasis of this approach is on experimental techniques intended to identify specific problems in a protocol or its implementation rather than the evaluation of system dependability through statistical metrics such as fault coverage. Hence, the focus is on developing fault injection techniques that can be employed in studying three aspects of a target protocol: i) detecting design or implementation errors, ii) identifying violations of protocol specifications, and iii) obtaining insights into the design decisions made by the implementers.