Emulation of software faults by educated mutations at machine-code level

This paper proposes a new technique to emulate software faults by educated mutations introduced at the machine-code level and presents an experimental study on the accuracy of the injected faults. The proposed method consists of finding key programming structures at the machine code-level where high-level software faults can be emulated. The main advantage of emulating software faults at the machine-code level is that software faults can be injected even when the source code of the target application is not available, which is very important for the evaluation of COTS components or for the validation of software fault tolerance techniques in COTS based systems. The technique was evaluated using several real programs and different types of faults and, additionally, it includes our study on the key aspects that may impact on the technique accuracy. The portability of the technique is also addressed. The results show that classes of faults such as assignment, checking, interface, and simple algorithm faults can be directly emulated using this technique.