TCP/IP Regression Test Suite - GSoC '16

• Student : Shivansh Rai (<shivansh@freebsd.org>)

• Mentor : Hiren Panchasara (<hiren@freebsd.org>)

The Code

Available on Github

Overview

Regression testing is one of the most critical elements of the test artifacts and proves to be one of the most preventive measures for testing a software. Currently, within FreeBSD, there is no such tool to perform regression testing of the TCP/IP network stack. The purpose of this project is to develop tests using a regression testing tool which can then be integrated with FreeBSD. Once integrated, the tool will also facilitate further development of such tests. The regression testing tool of choice here is packetdrill.

Project description

packetdrill currently supports testing multiple scenarios for TCP/IP protocol suite within Linux. This project aims to design and implement a wire level regression test suite for FreeBSD using packetdrill. The test suite will exercise various states in the TCP/IP protocol suite, with both IPv4 and IPv6 support. Besides Linux, the packetdrill tool works on {Free, Net, Open} BSD. The existing Linux test suite implemented within packetdrill will provide a basis for understanding, and implementation of the FreeBSD test suite. For the current scope of the project, only a subset of the existing test scenarios will be implemented.

Why Packetdrill?

While valuable for measuring overall performance, TCP regression testing with netperf, application load tests, or production workloads can fail to reveal significant functional bugs in congestion control, loss recovery, flow control, security, DoS hardening and protocol state machines. Such approaches suffer from noise due to variations in site/network conditions or content, and a lack of precision and isolation, thus bugs in these areas can go unnoticed. Since netperf is supposed to be more for benchmarking purposes and what we are trying to do is measure correctness, packetdrill, which was built with the same mindset, seemed an apt choice for this project.

Test Plan

packetdrill supports two modes of testing - local and remote. A TUN virtual network device is used in the local testing and a physical NIC is used for remote testing. Local testing is relatively easier to use because there is less timing variation and the users need not coordinate access to multiple machines.

The following tests will be done in order to ensure proper functioning of the tests as desired -

• Local mode testing
• Remote mode testing
• IPv4 and IPv6 protocol testing

Scenarios covered

Milestones

Future Plans

There is a huge scope for work yet to be done in this project, and I am not stopping anywhere in the near future. The final goal is to make this test suite exhaustive so that it can be easy for FreeBSD developers for checking the authenticity of the network stack, and that any misbehavior can be easily found out and rectified. The number of scenarios that can be added are innumerable, and the existing implemented set will be kept expanding and perfected. Some of the tasks which can be listed as of now are -

• Once we are successful in adding support in tcp_info() in packetdrill for checking window size, scenarios such as sliding window protocol, zero window handling and zero window probing can be successfully tested.

• Adding support for urgent pointer in packetdrill.

• packetdrill currently supports testing only a single connection at a time. An attempt will be made to patch it to support multiple concurrent connections.

• The current remote mode available in packetdrill allows testing a remote host provided there is already an instance of packetdrill running on it. There is not yet support for testing a remote host that does not have packetdrill running. One such approach for enabling support for this can be that instead of getting command line arguments and the script over a TCP connection, the current instance can get it directly. Hence, the logic for handshake with the client will be removed, the packets will be injected and the client will wait for inbound packets.
  

All the current bugs and enhancements in the project can be tracked via the issues on Github.

Acknowledgements

I cannot thank my mentor Hiren Panchasara enough for all the help and support which he has given in the entire duration of the project. Working in his guidance was full of fun and challenging. I would be grateful enough to receive his guidance in the future too while I continue to work on this project.
I also thank Michael Tuexen for all his help and guidance during the project.
I would also like to thank the FreeBSD community for accepting this project, which gave me a chance to gain a lot of knowledge.