Characterization of the impact of faulty drivers on the robustness of the Linux kernel

Albinet, Arnaud; Arlat, Jean; Fabre, Jean-Charles

doi:10.1109/dsn.2004.1311957

Cited by 61 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Similar to many other studies, e.g., [Albinet et al, 2004;Durães and Madeira, 2003], we model a monolithic system. The model consists of four layers: applications, OS, drivers and hardware platform.…”

Section: System Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The work reported in [Albinet et al, 2004;Durães and Madeira, 2003;Gu et al, 2004;Jarboui et al, 2002a] explored the use of various error models and injection techniques for OS robustness evaluation and benchmarking. In [Jarboui et al, 2002a], for instance, error models similar to ours are used, but are injected at different levels within the Linux kernel.…”

Section: Other Contemporary Software Error Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Albinet et al have also studied errors in device driver by injecting errors in the OS-Driver interface [Albinet et al, 2004]. The error model used is DT using the terminology in this thesis, but with a lower number of injection cases compared to ours.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Robustness Evaluation of Operating Systems

Johansson

2008

Information Assurance

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SummaryThe premise behind this thesis is the observation that Operating Systems (OS), being the foundation behind operations of computing systems, are complex entities and also subject to failures. Consequently, when they do fail, the impact is the loss of system service and the applications running thereon. While a multitude of sources for OS failures exist, device drivers are often identified as a prominent cause behind failures.In order to characterize the impact of driver failures, at both the OS and application levels, this thesis develops a framework for error propagation-based robustness profiling for an OS. The framework is first developed conceptually and then experimentally validated on a real OS, namely Windows CE .Net. The choice of Windows CE is driven by its representativeness for a multitude of OS's, as well as the ability to customize the OS components for particular needs.For experimental validation, fault injection is a prominent technique that can be used to simulate faults (or errors) in the system by inserting synthetic ones and study their effect. Three key questions with such a technique are where, what and when to inject faults. This thesis shows how injecting errors at the interface between drivers and the OS can be very effective in evaluating the effects driver faults can have.To quantify the OS's robustness, this thesis defines a series of error propagation measures, specifically tailored for device drivers. These measures allow for quantifying and comparing both individual services and device drivers on their susceptibility and diffusing abilities.This thesis compares three contemporary error models on their suitability for robustness evaluation. The classical bit-flip model is found to identify a higher number of severe failures in the system. It also identifies failures for more services than both other models, data type and fuzzing. However, its main drawback is that it requires substantially more injections than the other two. Fuzzing, even though not giving rise to as many failures is able to find new additional services with severe failures.A careful study of the injections performed with the bit-flip model shows that only a few bits are generally useful for identifying new services with robustness weaknesses. Consequently, a new composite model is proposed, combining the most effective bits of the bit-flip model with the fuzzing model's ability to identify new services, giving rise to new model without loss of important information and at the same time incurring a moderate number of injections.To answer the question of when to inject an error this thesis proposes a novel model of a driver's usage profile, focusing on high-level operations being carried out. It guides the injection of errors to instances when the driver is carrying out specific operations. Results from extensive fault injection experiments show that more service vulnerabilities can be discovered. Furthermore, a priori profiling of the drivers can show how effective the proposed approach will be. vi

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Section: System Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Other Contemporary Software Error Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Robustness Evaluation of Operating Systems

Johansson

2008

Information Assurance

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“…Nevertheless, most system administrators, users, and programmers still view them as an obscure and complex section of the operating system, which in part can be explained due to the DD necessity of addressing low level hardware details and OS internals. In the past, DD misbehavior has been pointed out as a prime cause for system crashes [3], and some researchers have showed that faults in DD can have a strong impact in the overall system dependability [4,5,6,7]. The recognized complexity associated with DD is aggravated as most vendors do not release openly the code, or even the hardware specifications.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intercept: Profiling Windows Network Device Drivers

Mendonça¹,

Neves²

2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Device drivers account for a substantial part of the operating system (OS), since they implement the code that interfaces the components connected to a computer system. Unfortunately, in the large majority of cases, hardware vendors do not release their code, making the analysis of failures attributed to device drivers extremely difficult. Although several instrumentation tools exist, most of them are useless to study device drivers as they work at user level. This paper presents Intercept, a tool that profiles Windows Device Drivers (WDD) and logs the driver interactions with the OS core at function level. The tool helps to understand how a WDD works and can provide support for several activities, such as debugging, robustness testing, or reverse engineering. Experiments using Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth device drivers show that Intercept is able to record function calls, parameters and return values, with small overheads even when the device driver under test is subject to a heavy workload.

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“…Robustness testing and fuzzers are some approaches that study the system's ability in handling with erroneous input conditions at their interface [2,18,22]. Throughout the years, these approaches have evolved into more intelligent, and less random, vulnerability detectors [6,31,36].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Behavioral Profiles to Detect Software Flaws in Network Servers

Antunes

Neves

2011

2011 IEEE 22nd International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering

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Some software faults, namely security vulnerabilities, tend to elude conventional testing methods. Since the effects of these faults may not be immediately perceived nor have a direct impact on the server's execution (e.g., a crash), they can remain hidden even if exercised by the test cases.Our detection approach consists in inferring a behavioral profile of a network server that models its correct execution by combining information about the implemented state machine protocol and the server's internal execution. Flaws are automatically detected if the server's behavior deviates from the profile while processing the test cases. This approach was implemented in a tool, which was used to analyze several FTP vulnerabilities, showing that it can effectively find various kinds of flaws.

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Characterization of the impact of faulty drivers on the robustness of the Linux kernel

Cited by 61 publications

References 16 publications

Robustness Evaluation of Operating Systems

Robustness Evaluation of Operating Systems

Intercept: Profiling Windows Network Device Drivers

Using Behavioral Profiles to Detect Software Flaws in Network Servers

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