LFI: A practical and general library-level fault injector

Abstract

Fault injection, a critical aspect of testing robust systems, is often overlooked in the development of general-purpose software. We believe this is due to the absence of easy-to-use tools and to the extensive manual labor required to perform fault injection tests. This paper introduces LFI (L ibrary Fault Injector), a tool that automates the preparation of fault scenarios and their injection at the boundary between shared libraries and applications. LFI extends prior work by automatically profiling fault behaviors of libraries via static analysis of their binaries, thus reducing the dependence on human labor and perfect documentation. We present techniques for automatically generating injection scenarios and we describe a simple language for expressing such scenarios. LFI does not require access to libraries' source code and works for Linux, Windows, and Solaris on x86 and SPARC platforms.