Publication
We present ConfErr, a tool for testing and quantifying the resilience of software systems to human-induced configuration errors. ConfErr uses human error models rooted in psychology and linguistics to generate realistic configuration mistakes; it then injects these mistakes and measures their effects, producing a resilience profile of the system under test. The resilience profile, capturing succinctly how sensitive the target software is to different classes of configuration errors, can be used for improving the software or to compare systems to each other. ConfErr is highly portable, because all mutations are performed on abstract representations of the configuration files. Using ConfErr, we found several serious flaws in the MySQL and Postgres databases, Apache web server, and BIND and djbdns name servers; we were also able to directly compare the resilience of functionally-equivalent systems, such as MySQL and Postgres.
Adrien Ghosn, Edouard Bugnion, Evangelos Marios Kogias, Mathias Josef Payer, Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes, Yuchen Qian, Neelu Shivprakash Kalani
Rachid Guerraoui, Le Nguyen Hoang, John Stephan, Sadegh Farhadkhani, Nirupam Gupta, Rafaël Benjamin Pinot
Alfio Quarteroni, Francesco Regazzoni, Marco Fedele, Stefano Pagani