Ballista Design and Methodology Ballista Design and Methodology

This report serves as initial documentation of the design and methodology to be employed by Ballista, an automatic robustness testing and hardening tool for Commercial Off-The-Shelf software components. The Ballista architecture includes the following major components: • Automatic testing of software modules determines whether they behave robustly in the face of exceptional inputs. • Characterization of response regions (behavior when presented exceptional input values) is performed over the parameter input space. Initial heuristics for this characterization are presented here. • Software wrapper routines are created to deflect any exceptional inputs that would, if uncaught, produce a “crash” or “hang” of the application software component. • A World Wide Web interface to users.