RIFLE: a general purpose pin-level fault injector

Authors

Henrique Madeira
Mário Alberto Zenha-Rela
F. Moreira
João Gabriel Silva

Abstract

This paper discusses the problems of pin-level fault injection for dependability
validation and presents the architecture of a pin-level fault injector called RIFLE. This system can be adapted to a wide range of target systems and the faults are mainly injected in the processor pins. The injection of the faults is deterministic and can be reproduced if needed. Faults of different nature can be injected and the fault injector is able to detect whether the injected fault has produced an error or not without the requirement of feedback circuits. RIFLE can also detect specific circumstances in which the injected faults do not affect the target system. Sets of faults with specific impact on the target system can be generated. The paper also presents fault injection results showing the coverage and latency achieved with a set of simple behavior based error detection mechanisms. It is shown that up to 72,5% of the errors can be detected with fairly simple mechanisms. Furthermore, for over 90% of the faults the target system has behaved according to the fail-silent model, which suggests that a traditional computer equipped
with simple error detection mechanisms is relatively close to a fail-silent computer.

Keywords

Pin-level Fault Injection

Subject

Fault Injection

Conference

1st European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC-1), October 1994

Cited by

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Year 2002 : 6 citations

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