Hovac: A Configurable Fault Injection Framework for Benchmarking the Dependability of C/C++ Applications

The increasing usage of third-party software and complexity of modern software systems makes dependability, in particular robustness against faulty code, an ever more important concern. To compare and quantitatively assess the dependability of different software systems, dependability benchmarks are needed. We present a configurable tool for dependability benchmarking, Hovac, which uses DLL API hooking to inject faults into third party library calls. Our fault classes are implemented based on the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) database, a community maintained source of real life software faults and errors. Using two example applications, we discuss a detailed and systematic approach to benchmarking the dependability of C/C++ applications using our tool.