SEDSR: Soft Error Detection Using Software Redundancy

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for soft error detection using software redundancy (SEDSR) that is able to detect transient faults. Soft errors damage the control flow and data of programs and designers usually use hardware-based solutions to handle them. Software-based techniques for soft error detection force less cost and delay to systems and do not change their configuration. Therefore, these kinds of methods are appropriate alternatives for hardware-based techniques. SEDSR has two separate parts for data and control flow errors detection. Fault injection method is used to compare SEDSR with previous methods of this field based on the new parameter of “Evaluation Factor” that takes in account fault coverage, memory and performance overheads. These parameters are important in real time safety critical applications. Experimental results on SPEC2000 and some traditional benchmarks of this field show that SEDSR is much better than previous methods of this field. SEDSR’s evaluation factor is about 50% better than other methods of this field. These results show its success in satisfaction of the existing tradeoff between fault coverage, performance and memory overheads

Efficient Design and Evaluation of Countermeasures against Fault Attacks Using Formal Verification

“…Software countermeasures can be designed at different levels, such as at an algorithmic level [6], in a high-level programming language [7][8][9] or at assembly level [10][11][12]. While higher level countermeasures may be optimized away or altered by a compiler, low-level countermeasures are compatible with existing compilers and toolchains.…”

“…Software countermeasures are often based on temporal redundancy (i.e. performing the same computation multiple times) to detect or tolerate errors during computations [10,12,8,11]. Control flow protection requires different mechanisms to detect a modification of the execution flow [7,14].…”

Data Error Detection and Recovery in Embedded Systems: a Literature Review

“…The introduced soft errors can corrupt the data of the program in execution. To counter this data corruption, a number of data flow error detection and recovery techniques have been proposed in literature [1,7,8,[12][13][14][15][16][17][19][20][21]. In previous work [4], we listed several data flow error detection techniques and discussed their reported results.…”

“…A number of data flow error detection techniques have been developed based on a unique duplication mechanism for better fault coverage or lower overhead in terms of memory consumption. The duplication can be applied at various levels such as a full duplication and selective duplication [1,4,7,8,[12][13][14][15]17,18]. Full duplication techniques and selective code duplication techniques are discussed in Sections 2.1 and 2.2 respectively.…”

“…Software redundancy increases the system's reliability but requires extra memory space and processing time to execute redundant instructions [15]. A number of software-based data error detection and recovery techniques have been proposed and implemented in literature for fault-tolerant embedded systems [1,7,8,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22].…”