Control Flow Checking or Not? (for Soft Errors)

Abstract

Huge leaps in performance and power improvements of computing systems are driven by rapid technology scaling, but technology scaling has also rendered computing systems susceptible to soft errors. Among the soft error protection techniques, Control Flow Checking (CFC) based techniques have gained a reputation of being lightweight yet effective. The main idea behind CFCs is to check if the program is executing the instructions in the right order. In order to validate the protection claims of existing CFCs, we develop a systematic and quantitative method to evaluate the protection achieved by CFCs using the metric of vulnerability. Our quantitative analysis indicates that existing CFC techniques are not only ineffective in providing protection from soft faults, but incur additional performance and power overheads. Our results show that software-only CFC protection schemes increase system vulnerability by 18%-21% with 17%-38% performance overhead and hybrid CFC protection increases vulnerability by 5%. Although the vulnerability remains almost the same for hardware-only CFC protection, they incur overheads of design cost, area, and power due to the hardware modifications required for their implementations. CCS Concepts: • Computer systems organization → Reliability; • Software and its engineering → Data flow architectures; Control structures;

Using Hopfield Networks to Correct Instruction Faults

“…Instruction repeating, error correction codes, and signature comparisons are not able to correct different types of faults. This is shown to increase the vulnerability for some cases [31]. In contrast, our scheme is shown to detect and correct various instruction faults with various amounts of bitflips (up to 11 for fault models 4-I/II).…”

Sofia: An Automated Framework for Early Soft Error Assessment, Identification, and Mitigation

“…While a control-flow error occurs when an error causes a deviation from the correct program flow (e.g., incorrect branch), a data-flow soft error refers to the occurrence of a bit-flip in a storage element, such as a register or memory block. The application hardening module integrates data-flow mitigation techniques because most soft errors affect data-flow rather than the system's control-flow [38]. The underlying software-based mitigation techniques are architecture-independent, and their development is underpinned by a set of rules proposed in [39], which target data-flow strategies that aim to detect faults affecting values stored in register banks and memory elements.…”

Survey of Control-Flow Integrity Techniques for Embedded and Real-Time Embedded Systems

“…While CFI techniques are built considering an adversarial perspective, there exists a line of research that applies similar methodologies to detect erroneous control-flow redirection due to non-malicious soft-errors [41,68,74,87]. These works utilize very similar techniques, such as by creating signatures for each basic block (code blocks that are delineated by control-flow transfers but do not contain any transfers themselves) and comparing currently executing basic block against a pre-determined graph of valid signature chains [63].…”