A Formal Approach to Robustness Testing of Network Protocol
NPC '08 Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing
A systematic review of software robustness
Information and Software Technology
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Network protocol implementations are susceptible toproblems caused by their lack of ability to handle invalidinputs. We present ASPIRE: Automated Systematic ProtocolImplementation Robustness Evaluation, an automatedapproach to pro-actively test protocol implementations byobserving their responses to faulty Protocol Data Units(PDUs) or messages. In contrast to existing approaches,we sample the faulty PDU space in a systematic manner,thus allowing us to evaluate protocol implementations in theface of a wider variety of faulty PDUs. We use a pruningstrategy to reduce, from exponential, the size of the faultyPDU set to polynomial in the number of fields of a PDU.We have implemented the ASPIRE algorithms and evaluatedthem on implementations of HTTP (Apache, GoogleWeb Server (GWS), and Microsoft IIS) and SMTP (Sendmailand Microsoft Exchange) protocols. Our results show thatApache, GWS, and IIS, although implementing the sameprotocol specification, behave differently on faulty HTTPPDUs; Sendmail and Exchange are different in handlingour faulty SMTP PDUs.