A Testing Based Empirical Study of Dynamic Software Update Safety Restrictions

Abstract

Recent years have seen significant advances in dynamic software updating (DSU) systems, which allow programs to be patched on the fly. Most DSU systems employ automatic safety checks to avoid applying a patch if doing so may lead to incorrect behavior. This paper presents what we believe is the first comprehensive empirical evaluation of the two most significant DSU safety checks: activeness safety (AS), which disallows patches that modify functions on the stack, and con-freeness safety (CFS), which allows modifications to active functions, but only when doing so will be type safe.

To measure the checks' effectiveness, we tested them against three years of updates to Open-SSH and vsftpd. We performed this testing using a novel DSU testing methodology that systematically applies updates throughout the execution of a test suite. After testing updates to both applications in this way, we tracked how often the safety checks allow updates and which updates result in test failures. We found that updating without safety checks produced many failures, and that both AS and CFS dramatically reduced, but did not fully eliminate, these failures. CFS yielded more failures than AS, but AS was more restrictive than CFS, disallowing far more successful updates. Our results suggest that neither AS nor CFS is likely suitable for general-purpose DSU on its own. Indeed, we found that selecting update points manually could avoid all failures while still permitting sufficient updates. Our results present a challenge and important insights for future work: to discover safe and sufficient update points fully automatically.