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Softw. Eng. Methodol."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2024,6,30]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Software-defined networks (SDN) enable flexible and effective communication systems that are managed by centralized software controllers. However, such a controller can undermine the underlying communication network of an SDN-based system and thus must be carefully tested. When an SDN-based system fails, in order to address such a failure, engineers need to precisely understand the conditions under which it occurs. In this article, we introduce a machine learning-guided fuzzing method, named FuzzSDN, aiming at both (1)\u00a0generating effective test data leading to failures in SDN-based systems and (2)\u00a0learning accurate failure-inducing models that characterize conditions under which such system fails. To our knowledge, no existing work simultaneously addresses these two objectives for SDNs. We evaluate FuzzSDN by applying it to systems controlled by two open-source SDN controllers. Furthermore, we compare FuzzSDN with two state-of-the-art methods for fuzzing SDNs and two baselines for learning failure-inducing models. Our results show that (1)\u00a0compared to the state-of-the-art methods, FuzzSDN generates at least 12 times more failures, within the same time budget, with a controller that is fairly robust to fuzzing and (2)\u00a0our failure-inducing models have, on average, a precision of 98% and a recall of 86%, significantly outperforming the baselines.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3641541","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,1,23]],"date-time":"2024-01-23T12:29:43Z","timestamp":1706012983000},"page":"1-25","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Learning Failure-Inducing Models for Testing Software-Defined Networks"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"33","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8219-0466","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Rapha\u00ebl","family":"Ollando","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9025-7173","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Seung Yeob","family":"Shin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1393-1010","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lionel C.","family":"Briand","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Lero SFI Centre for Software Research, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland and University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,6,3]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_1_2_2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3544216.3544220"},{"key":"e_1_3_1_3_2","first-page":"1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Advances in the Emerging Computing Technologies","author":"Alshanqiti Abdullah M.","year":"2019","unstructured":"Abdullah M. 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