Research And Design On General Purpose Fault Injection Model Based On Windows API

As the usage of PC platform widens a lot today, general purpose software on PC platform is getting more and more complicated. The causes of software's fault are mainly software itself. Software system also requires dependability. But traditional fault injection thoughts often focus on accurate bit-level faults, depending on powerful hardware platform. On PC platform, things are limited by economy factors, and the hardware itself cannot provide fault-free environment. So, it is only assumed that hardware is fault-free when designing software, but not assured. That is the key difference.This paper pointed out the limitations of traditional fault injection techniques. Traditional fault injection techniques depend on fault-tolerant platform, but PC platform lack such advanced fault-tolerant features, or the cost is too high.This paper advanced a runtime fault injection model to test windows applications on PC platform, using the fault injection theory. The key point of injection is focused on runtime environment factors. The model defined different fault types of memory, network, disk and registry. Faults that appear often in real environments are chosen using pattern-based fault injection strategy. This model can meet the requirements of fault injection purpose for windows application.Secondly, this paper analyzed the implementation technique of such a model. We can define an imposter function to intercept system calls from application under test, using Windows API. The intercepted calls are passed to the imposter function, then return back to the application.At last, detailed function design of the runtime fault injection model was given out. The functionality model was described by scenarios. Iterative methods was used to design the interfaces, including return codes.