🚀 go-pugleaf

Weekly SDI/LCS Seminar
Thursday, February 10
Noon - 1 pm
Hamerschlag Hall, Conference Room D210
Contacts:  karen@ece.cmu.edu or deb@cs.cmu.edu

TITLE:

Robustness Testing of the Microsoft Win32 API

ABSTRACT:

Although Microsoft Windows is being deployed in mission-critical
applications, little quantitative data has been published about its
robustness. We present the results of executing over two million
Ballista-generated exception handling tests across 237 C library
functions and Win32 API system calls involving six Windows variants, as
well as similar tests conducted on the Linux operating system. Windows
98, Windows 95, and Windows CE were found to be vulnerable to complete
system crashes caused by very simple C programs for several different
functions. No system crashes were observed on Windows NT, Windows 2000,
and Linux. Linux was significantly more graceful at handling exceptions
from system calls in a program-recoverable manner than Windows NT and
Windows 2000, but those Windows variants were more robust than Linux
(with glibc) at handling C library exceptions. While the choice of
operating systems cannot be made solely on the basis of one set of
tests, it is hoped that such results will form a starting point for
comparing dependability across heterogeneous platforms.


BIO:

Charles Shelton is a second year graduate student in the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. His
advisor is Philip Koopman. He received his B.S. in computer engineering
in 1998 from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has been
working on software fault tolerance and fault injection issues in the
Ballista project since his arrival here. He is currently finishing his
Master's Degree and preparing for the PhD qualifying exam.