Supporting Early-Safety Analysis of IoT Systems by Exploiting Testing Techniques

TL;DR

This paper proposes using testing techniques to enhance the safety analysis of IoT systems by systematically injecting failures to improve failure logic rules and predict potential failure scenarios more accurately.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that leverages testing methodologies to automate and refine failure logic analysis in IoT systems, addressing manual specification challenges.

Findings

Testing-based failure injection improves FLA rule completeness

Enhanced FLA rules lead to better failure scenario prediction

Systematic testing reduces manual effort in safety analysis

Abstract

IoT systems complexity and susceptibility to failures pose significant challenges in ensuring their reliable operation Failures can be internally generated or caused by external factors impacting both the systems correctness and its surrounding environment To investigate these complexities various modeling approaches have been proposed to raise the level of abstraction facilitating automation and analysis FailureLogic Analysis FLA is a technique that helps predict potential failure scenarios by defining how a components failure logic behaves and spreads throughout the system However manually specifying FLA rules can be arduous and errorprone leading to incomplete or inaccurate specifications In this paper we propose adopting testing methodologies to improve the completeness and correctness of these rules How failures may propagate within an IoT system can be observed by systematically injecting failures while running test cases to collect evidence useful to add complete and refine FLA rules