The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes, Second Edition

Chapter 16. Fault Injection

Fault injection technologies have been used for more than half a century to verify the fault tolerance of hardware solutions. Fault injection systems are currently used to test the machinery in the cars we drive, the engines in the airplanes that fly us, and even the heating elements that warm our coffee. These systems inject faults through the pins of integrated circuits, via bursts of EMI, by altering voltage levels, in some cases, even through the use of radiation. These days every major hardware manufacturer employs some sort of fault injection system within their testing process.

As our technologies transcend from analog to digital, the amount of software in use grows at an exponential rate. The question that should be asked is: What tools do we have that will test the dependability of our software?

During the past decade, several fault injection solutions have been developed to detect serious problems in enterprise software. Many of these software-based fault injections solutions were created during the course of several research grants sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Software fault injections systems such as DEPEND, DOCTOR, Xception, FERRARI, FINE, FIST, ORCHESTRA, MENDOSUS, and ProFI have demonstrated that fault injection technologies can be used to successfully enumerate a variety of faults in enterprise ...