Random Additive Control Flow Error Detection

Abstract

Today, embedded systems are being used in many (safetycritical) applications. However, due to their decreasing feature size and supply voltage, such systems are more susceptible to external disturbances such as electromagnetic interference. These external disturbances are able to introduce bit-flips inside the microcontroller's hardware. In turn, these bit-flips may also corrupt the software. A possible software corruption is a control flow error. This paper proposes a new softwareimplemented control flow error detection technique. The advantage of our technique, called Random Additive Control Flow Error Detection, is a high detection ratio with a low execution time overhead. Most control flow errors are detected, while having a lower execution time overhead than the considered existing techniques.

Automatic Implementation of Control Flow Error Detection Techniques

“…The shown UML class diagram depicts the classes and methods to implement a CFE detection technique. Our plugin supports the following CFE detection techniques: CFCSS [18], YACCA (2 versions) [10], ECCA [1], RSCFC [16], SEDSR [5], SCFC [6], SIED [17], RASM [21] and RACFED [22]. However, to keep the diagram in Fig.…”

“…When doing this however, and taking the appropriate measures to assure the compiler does not optimize away the added instructions, experiments have shown that the CFE detection techniques detect around 65 % of the occurring CFEs. In contrast, literature describes an error detection ratio of 75 % and higher [18,10,1,16,5,6,17,21,22]. This mismatch in error detection ratios is caused by the fact that human-readable high-level code is not mapped one-to-one to machine-readable low-level code.…”

“…To increase the reliability of embedded systems, several software-implemented CFE detection techniques have been proposed [18,10,1,16,5,6,17,21,22]. Such techniques add extra control variables at compile time.…”

“…Therefore, we propose a compiler extension that can automatically implement a variety of software-implemented CFE detection techniques in the low-level code of the program. We support both pre-existing techniques [18,10,1,16,5,6,17] and our in-house developed techniques [21,22]. As Fig.…”

A New Approach to Selectively Implement Control Flow Error Detection Techniques

“…To increase the reliability of embedded systems, several software-implemented CFE detection techniques, have been proposed [10,11]. In a previous comparative study, we developed a CFE detection technique called RACFED which has a higher detection ratio at a lower execution time overhead when compared to similar techniques [15]. The imposed execution time overhead, however, is still relatively high.…”