A 'Crystal Ball' for Software Liability

Software fault injection is an emerging technology that can be used to observe how software systems behave under experimentally controlled anomalous circumstances In so doing software fault injection acts as a crystal ball predicting how badly software might behave should things go awry both internally and externally during execution Such predictions provide clues as to how robust a piece of code is where in the code robustness is de cient and most importantly what level of liability is incurred by relying on a particular software system Once we nd places in the code that are intolerant to the occurrence of anomalous events we have found a source of liability within the software Fault injection is an e cient scienti c means for predicting how events might unfold in the future