Fault Injection

Packet Loss Attack

The Packet Loss Gremlin randomly injects a percentage of packet loss (or packet corruption) into IP packets at the transport layer, targeted by supplied port and host arguments.

Linux

The Packet Loss Gremlin uses existing Quality of Service (QOS) and Differentiated Services (diffserv) facilities in the Linux kernel to emulate natural packet loss (and optionally packet corruption).

This Gremlin does not interact with iptables, and so it does not interfere with any existing iptables rulesets.

This Gremlin requires the NET_ADMIN capability, which is enabled for Gremlin by default at installation time. See capabilities(7)

Options

Parameter	Flag	Required	Default	Version	Description
IP Addresses	-i IP address	False		0.0.1	Only impact traffic to these IP addresses. Also accepts CIDR values (i.e. `10.0.0.0/24`).
Device	-d interfaces	False	Device discovery	0.0.1	Impact traffic over these network interfaces. Comma separated lists and multiple arguments supported. You can define multiple interfaces starting with agent version 2.30.0.
Hostnames	-h hostnames	False	`^api.gremlin.com`	0.0.1	Only impact traffic to these hostnames.
Remote Ports	-p port numbers	False	`^53`	0.0.1	Only impact outgoing traffic to these destination ports. Also accepts port ranges (e.g. `8080-8085`).
Local Ports	-s port numbers	False		0.0.1	Only impact outgoing traffic from these source ports. Also accepts port ranges (e.g. `8080-8085`).
Percent	-r <0-100>	False	`1`	0.0.1	Percentage of packets to drop (10 is 10%).
Protocol	-P {TCP, UDP, ICMP}	False	all	1.5.3	Only impact a specific protocol.
Corrupt	-c	False	`False`	0.0.1	Corrupt the packets instead of just dropping them.
Providers	WebUI and API Only	False		0.0.1	External service providers to affect.
Tags	WebUI and API Only	False		0.0.1	Only impact traffic to hosts running Gremlin clients associated with these tags.
Length	-l int	False	`60`	0.0.1	The length of the experiment (seconds).