RI-Po robustness-testing of BGP through specification mutations

Robustness testing is a very active research area in protocol testing. This paper starts with the analysis of RI-Pro of BGP-4, and then builds scenario model to describe the process of route update. The new model studies the RI-Pro from the relationship of scenario units instead of the function of RI-Pro. Based on this model, we give a new specification of RI-Pro by redefining its scenario unit, expression, predicate, interface, action, and behavior. A mutation operator set for RI-Pro of BGP is presented, addressing: scenario unit, expression and interface. Through specification mutating, the conflict relationships set which is used for constructing the robustness-testing case can be generated completely. All the above compose the systematic robustness testing approach. Robustness testing experiments on Cisco 7200 indicates that the error handling coverage of the negative test suite generated by this approach is increased by 48 percent, and the error-detecting capability is enhanced by 1.3 times.