From Network Traces to System Responses: Opaquely Emulating Software Services

Abstract: Enterprise software systems make complex interactions with other services in their environment. Developing and testing for production-like conditions is therefore a challenging task. Prior approaches include emulations of the dependency services using either explicit modelling or record-and-replay approaches. Models require deep knowledge of the target services while record-and-replay is limited in accuracy. We present a new technique that improves the accuracy of record-and-replay approaches, without requiring prior knowledge of the services. The approach uses multiple sequence alignment to derive message prototypes from recorded system interactions and a scheme to match incoming request messages against message prototypes to generate response messages. We introduce a modified Needleman-Wunsch algorithm for distance calculation during message matching, wildcards in message prototypes for high variability sections, and entropy-based weightings in distance calculations for increased accuracy. Combined, our new approach has shown greater than 99% accuracy for four evaluated enterprise system messaging protocols.