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The Effectiveness of Software Diversity in a Large Population of Programs
November/December 2008 (vol. 34 no. 6)
pp. 753-764
In this paper, we first present an exploratory analysis of the aspects of multiple-version software diversity using 36,123, programs written to the same specification. We do so within the framework of the theories of Eckhardt & Lee and Littlewood & Miller. We analyse programming faults made, explore failure regions and difficulty functions, show how effective 1-out-of-2 diversity is and how language diversity increases this effectiveness. The second part of the paper generalizes the findings about 1-out-of-2 diveristity, and its special case language diversity by performing statistical analyses of 89,402 programs written to 60 specifications. Most observations in the exploratory analysis are confirmed; however, although the benefit of language diversity can be observed, its effectiveness appears to be low.
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Index Terms:
Programming Techniques, Protection mechanisms, Design concepts, Quality analysis and evaluation, Software and System Safety, Reliability, Reliability, Performance measures
Citation:
Meine J.P. van der Meulen, Miguel A. Revilla, "The Effectiveness of Software Diversity in a Large Population of Programs," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 753-764, Nov./Dec. 2008, doi:10.1109/TSE.2008.70
