LDSFI: a Lightweight Dynamic Software-based Fault Injection

Abstract

Recently, numerous safety-critical systems have employed a variety of fault tolerance techniques, which are considered an essential requirement to keep the system fault-tolerant. While the current trend in processors technology has increased their effectiveness and performance, the sensitivity of processors to soft errors has increased significantly, making their fault tolerance ability questionable. In this context, fault injection is considered as one of the most popular, rapid, and cost-effective techniques which enables the designers to assess the fault tolerance of systems under faults before their deployment. In this paper, a pure software fault injection technique called LDSFI (a Lightweight Dynamic Software-based Fault Injection) is presented and evaluated. Due to the dynamic aspect of LDSFI, faults are automatically injected into binary code at runtime. Thereby, the proposed technique does not impose any program runtime overhead since the intended source code is not required. The effectiveness of LDSFI was validated through performing exhaustive fault injection experiments using well-known benchmarks. The experiments were carried out using a Core 2 Duo processor, as an Intel x86 Dual-Core PC with 4GB RAM running Ubuntu Linux 14.04 with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) version 4.9. Since LDSFI relies on the GNU, it is highly portable and can be adapted for different platforms.