Dependable Systems Lab

LFI: A Tool Suite for Library-Level Fault Injection

Thorough testing of dependable software systems requires ways to productively employ fault injection. Yet, fault injection is rarely used in software development. We believe this is because meaningful fault injection requires too much manual labor and, if not done carefully, can result in many false positives.

In response to this, we developed LFI, a tool suite that automatically identifies the errors exposed by shared libraries, finds potentially buggy error recovery code in program binaries, and produces corresponding injection scenarios. LFI injects the desired faults – in the form of error return codes and corresponding side effects – at the boundary between shared libraries and applications. Since LFI automatically profiles fault behaviors of libraries via static analysis of their binaries, it reduces the dependence on human labor and correct documentation. LFI also allows developers to write precise custom triggers for controlled fault injection experiments.

LFI does not require access to libraries’ source code and works for Linux, Windows, and Solaris on x86 and SPARC platforms. In our use, LFI has automatically found many serious bugs in systems like the BIND name server, Git version control system, MySQL database server, PBFT replication system, and Pidgin IM client. LFI also achieved 35%-60% improvement in recovery-code coverage without requiring any new tests.

People

• Paul D. Marinescu
• Radu Banabic
• Eric Bisolfati
• Prof. George Candea

Publications

• Efficient Testing of Recovery Code Using Fault Injection
  Paul D. Marinescu and George Candea
  ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), 29(4), December 2011

• An Extensible Technique for High-Precision Testing of Recovery Code
  Paul D. Marinescu, Radu Banabic, and George Candea
  Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX), Boston, MA, June 2010

• Studying Application–Library Interaction and Behavior with LibTrac
  Eric Bisolfati, Paul Marinescu, and George Candea
  Proc. Intl. Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Chicago, IL, June 2010

• LFI: A Practical and General Library-Level Fault Injector
  Paul D. Marinescu and George Candea
  Proc. Intl. Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Lisbon, Portugal, June 2009

Downloads

You can get LFI from GitHub: https://github.com/dslab-epfl/lfi