cme: Coronal Mass Exception - Inject bit-flips in a process.

cme is a utility for simulating "random" bit-flips in a running program. This tool can be used to test the resilience of your program towards unexpected bit flips.

Notes

• This idea was posed to me by a good friend of mine, thanks count!
• cme requires privileged access to run (it uses ptrace).
• cme is only expected to work on linux systems (systems that run a gnu flavor of libc and on systems that have a ptrace system call).

Usage

Run cme on a process ID (pid) is already running running and specify a number of unexpected bit-flips to introduce:

./cme -p <process id of target> -n <number of bit-flips>

Building

Run make

Resources

• Examples of ptrace usage:
  • http://visa.lab.asu.edu/gitlab/fstrace/fstrace/commit/31fa8a22b17b2f898513b68e04269597147d2478
  • https://android.googlesource.com/platform/bionic/+/master/tests/sys_ptrace_test.cpp

Contact

Matt Davis: https://github.com/enferex