Hi, I'm João Neto

Recent discoveries of vulnerabilities in the design and implementation of Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols underscore the need for testing and exploration techniques to ensure their correctness. While there has been some recent effort for automated test generation for BFT protocols, there is no benchmark framework available to systematically evaluate their performance. We present ByzzBench, a benchmark framework designed to evaluate the performance of testing algorithms in detecting Byzantine fault tolerance bugs. ByzzBench is designed for a standardized implementation of BFT protocols and their execution in a controlled testing environment. It controls the nondeterminism in the concurrency, network, and process faults in the protocol execution, enabling the functionality to enforce particular execution scenarios and thereby facilitating the implementation of testing algorithms for BFT protocols.

Controlled concurrency testing (CCT) is an effective approach for testing distributed system implementations. However, the existing CCT tools suffer from the drawbacks of language dependency and the cost of source code instrumentation, which makes them difficult to apply to real-world production systems. We propose DSTest, a generalized CCT tool for testing distributed system implementations. DSTest intercepts messages on the application layer and, hence, eliminates the instrumentation cost and achieves language independence with minimal input. We provide a clean and modular interface to extend DSTest for various event schedulers for CCT. We package DSTest with three well-known event schedulers and validate the tool by applying it to popular production systems.