Differential Testing of Bundle Protocol v7 Implementations: A Preliminary Report

Authors: Stephan Havermans, Lars Baumgaertner, Marcus Wallum and Juan Caballero

Communication protocols are integral to space systems. As such, their implementations should be thoroughly tested for conformance, interoperability, and security issues. This work-in-progress presents a novel differential approach for protocol testing and preliminary results from its application. Our approach takes as input multiple implementations of the same protocol, executes the implementations on a large number of inputs, and identifies deviation inputs that are accepted (i.e., successfully parsed and validated) by some implementations but rejected by other implementations. We have applied our approach to test three implementations of Bundle Protocol version 7, identifying 51,373 deviation inputs grouped into 432 clusters. So far, we have reported 14 manually verified conformance issues and vulnerabilities. Eight have already been fixed.