Affiliation:
1. Institut für Informatik Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin Berlin Germany
2. Physics Department and IRIS Adlershof Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin Berlin Germany
Abstract
AbstractContextComputational materials science (CMS) focuses on in silico experiments to compute the properties of known and novel materials, where many software packages are used in the community. The NOMAD Laboratory (Draxl C, Scheffler) offers to store the input and output files in its FAIR data repository. Since the file formats of these software packages are non‐standardized, parsers are used to provide the results in a normalized format.ObjectiveThe main goal of this article is to report experience and findings of using grammar‐based fuzzing on these parsers.MethodWe have constructed an input grammar for four common software packages in the CMS domain and performed an experimental evaluation on the capabilities of grammar‐based fuzzing to detect failures in the Novel Materials Discovery (NOMAD) parsers.ResultsWith our approach, we were able to identify three unique critical bugs concerning service availability, as well as several additional syntactic, semantic, logical, and downstream bugs in the investigated NOMAD parsers. We reported all issues to the developer team prior to publication.ConclusionBased on the experience gained, we can recommend grammar‐based fuzzing also for other research software packages to improve the trust level in the correctness of the produced results.
Funder
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft