ConfVD: System Reactions Analysis and Evaluation Through Misconfiguration Injection

In recent years, misconfigurations have become one of the major causes of software system failures, resulting in numerous service outages. What is worse, misconfigurations are also costly to diagnose and troubleshoot. This remains a great challenge for sysadmins (system administrators) to detect, diagnose, or troubleshoot these misconfigurations. Unlike software bugs, misconfigurations are more vulnerable to sysadmins’ mistakes. Developers and researchers are attempting to improve system reactions to misconfigurations to ease the burden of sysadmins’ diagnoses. Such efforts would greatly benefit from the techniques that can comprehensively detect bad system reactions through injected misconfigurations. Unfortunately, few such studies have achieved the above goal in the past, primarily because they only relied on generic alterations and failed to find a way to systematically generate misconfigurations. In this paper, we study eight mature open-source and commercial software packages and summarize a fine-grained classification of option types. Based on this classification, we use Augmented Backus–Naur Form to summarize and extract syntactic and semantic constraints of each type. In order to generate comprehensive misconfigurations in the test systems, we propose misconfiguration generation methods for our constraints. We implement a tool named Configuration Vulnerability Detector (ConfVD) to conduct misconfiguration injection and further analyze the systems’ reaction abilities to various misconfigurations. We carried out comprehensive analyses upon Apache Httpd, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Yum. The results of our analysis show that our option classification covers 96% of 1582 options from the above-mentioned systems. Our constraints are more fine grained than previous works and their accuracy was found to be 91% (ascertained by manual verification). Our technique could improve generic alteration approaches without constraints, and we found that ConfVD could find nearly three times the bad reactions that were found by ConfErr. In total, we found 65 bad reactions from the systems being tested and our fine-grained constraints contributed 27.7% more bad reactions than techniques only using coarse-grained constraints.