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Abstract. In the future, we expect commodity hardware to be used in safety-critical applications. However, in the future commodity hardware is expected to become less reliable and more susceptible to soft errors because of decreasing feature size and reduced power supply. Thus, software-implemented approaches to deal with unreliable hardware will be needed. To simplify the handling of value failures, we provide failure virtualization in the sense that we transform arbitrary value failures caused by erroneous execution into fail-stop failures. The latter ones are easier to handle. Therefore, we use the arithmetic AN-code because it provides very good error detection capabilities. Arithmetic codes are suitable for the protection of commodity hardware because guarantees can be provided independent of the executing hardware. This paper presents the encoding compiler EC-AN which applies AN-encoding to arbitrary programs. According to our knowledge, this is the first in software implemented complete AN-encoding. Former encoding compilers either encode only small parts of applications or trade-off safety to enable complete AN-encoding.

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Abstract. It is expected that commodity hardware is becoming less reliable because of the continuously decreasing feature sizes of integrated circuits. Nevertheless, more and more commodity hardware with insufficient error detection is used in critical applications. One possible solution is to detect hardware errors in software using arithmetic AN-codes. These codes detect hardware errors independent of the actual failure modes of the underlying hardware. However, measurements have shown that AN-codes still exhibit large rates of undetected silent data corruptions (SDC). These high rates of undetected SDCs are caused by the insufficient protection of control and data flow through AN-codes. In contrast, ANB-and ANBD-codes promise much higher error detection rates because they also detect errors in control and data flow. We present our encoding compiler that automatically applies either an AN-, ANBor ANBD-code to an application. Our error injections show that AN-, ANB-, and ANBD-codes successfully detect errors and more important that indeed ANB-and ANBD-codes reduce the SDC rate more effectively than AN-codes. The difference between ANBD-and ANB-codes is also visible but less pronounced.