TY - JOUR
T1 - Learning Failure-Inducing Models for Testing Software-Defined Networks
AU - Ollando, Raphaël
AU - Shin, Seung Yeob
AU - Briand, Lionel C.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2024/6/3
Y1 - 2024/6/3
N2 - Software-defined networks (SDN) enable flexible and effective communication systems that are managed by centralized software controllers. However, such a controller can undermine the underlying communication network of an SDN-based system and thus must be carefully tested. When an SDN-based system fails, in order to address such a failure, engineers need to precisely understand the conditions under which it occurs. In this article, we introduce a machine learning-guided fuzzing method, named FuzzSDN, aiming at both (1) generating effective test data leading to failures in SDN-based systems and (2) learning accurate failure-inducing models that characterize conditions under which such system fails. To our knowledge, no existing work simultaneously addresses these two objectives for SDNs. We evaluate FuzzSDN by applying it to systems controlled by two open-source SDN controllers. Furthermore, we compare FuzzSDN with two state-of-the-art methods for fuzzing SDNs and two baselines for learning failure-inducing models. Our results show that (1) compared to the state-of-the-art methods, FuzzSDN generates at least 12 times more failures, within the same time budget, with a controller that is fairly robust to fuzzing and (2) our failure-inducing models have, on average, a precision of 98% and a recall of 86%, significantly outperforming the baselines.
AB - Software-defined networks (SDN) enable flexible and effective communication systems that are managed by centralized software controllers. However, such a controller can undermine the underlying communication network of an SDN-based system and thus must be carefully tested. When an SDN-based system fails, in order to address such a failure, engineers need to precisely understand the conditions under which it occurs. In this article, we introduce a machine learning-guided fuzzing method, named FuzzSDN, aiming at both (1) generating effective test data leading to failures in SDN-based systems and (2) learning accurate failure-inducing models that characterize conditions under which such system fails. To our knowledge, no existing work simultaneously addresses these two objectives for SDNs. We evaluate FuzzSDN by applying it to systems controlled by two open-source SDN controllers. Furthermore, we compare FuzzSDN with two state-of-the-art methods for fuzzing SDNs and two baselines for learning failure-inducing models. Our results show that (1) compared to the state-of-the-art methods, FuzzSDN generates at least 12 times more failures, within the same time budget, with a controller that is fairly robust to fuzzing and (2) our failure-inducing models have, on average, a precision of 98% and a recall of 86%, significantly outperforming the baselines.
KW - fuzzing
KW - machine learning
KW - software testing
KW - Software-defined networks
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85195878361&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3641541
DO - 10.1145/3641541
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85195878361
SN - 1049-331X
VL - 33
JO - ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
JF - ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
IS - 5
M1 - 113
ER -