Challenging Malicious Inputs with Fault Tolerance Techniques

Most of the attacks attempt an initial activation which means the first occurrence of an error provoked by the fault. If its unable to stop the propagation, a fault will be transformed into a failure, causing consequences. This paper presents an exploratory research about the integration of fault tolerance aiming defenses against malicious inputs. When a fault occurs, these techniques provide mechanisms to prevent the occurrence of software systems’ failures. Several programming methods that are used by several software, fault tolerance techniques include: assertions, checkpointing and atomic actions. Some basic and classic techniques provided by software fault tolerance that will be covered are: Recovery Block, N-Version Programming, Retry Blocks and N-Copy Programming.