This is a comprehensive guide to fault injection techniques used to evaluate the dependability of a digital system. The description and the critical analysis of different fault injection techniques and tools are authored by key scientists in the field of system dependability and fault tolerance.

Fault Injection Techniques and Tools for Embedded Systems Reliability Evaluation

This paper addresses the issue of characterizing the respective impact of fault injection techniques. Three physical techniques and one software-implemented technique that have been used to assess the fault tolerance features of the MARS fault-tolerant distributed real-time system are compared and analyzed. After a short summary of the fault tolerance features of the MARS architecture and especially of the error detection mechanisms that were used to compare the erroneous behaviors induced by the fault injection techniques considered, we describe the common distributed testbed and test scenario implemented to perform a coherent set of fault injection campaigns. The main features of the four fault injection techniques considered are then briefly described and the results obtained are finally presented and discussed. Emphasis is put on the analysis of the specific impact and merit of each injection technique.

/pdf/comparison-of-physical-and-software-implemented-fault-4fxzbenped.pdf

Comparison of physical and software-implemented fault injection techniques

Because of our present inability to produce error-free software, software fault tolerance is and will continue to be an important consideration in software systems. The root cause of software design errors is the complexity of the systems. Compounding the problems in building correct software is the difficulty in assessing the correctness of software for highly complex systems. After a brief overview of the software development processes, we note how hard-to-detect design faults are likely to be introduced during development and how software faults tend to be state-dependent and activated by particular input sequences. Although component reliability is an important quality measure for system level analysis, software reliability is hard to characterize and the use of post-verification reliability estimates remains a controversial issue. For some applications software safety is more important than reliability, and fault tolerance techniques used in those applications are aimed at preventing catastrophes. Single version software fault tolerance techniques discussed include system structuring and closure, atomic actions, inline fault detection, exception handling, and others. Multiversion techniques are based on the assumption that software built differently should fail differently and thus, if one of the redundant versions fails, it is expected that at least one of the other versions will provide an acceptable output. Recovery blocks, N-version programming, and other multiversion techniques are reviewed.

/pdf/software-fault-tolerance-a-tutorial-yut83cx3gj.pdf

Software Fault Tolerance: A Tutorial

Operating systems form a foundation for robust application software, making it important to understand how effective they are at handling exceptional conditions. The Ballista testing system was used to characterize the handling of exceptional input parameter values for up to 233 POSIX functions and system calls on each of 15 widely used operating system (OS) implementations. This identified ways to crash systems with a single call, ways to cause task hangs within OS code, ways to cause abnormal task termination within OS and library code, failures to implement defined POSIX functionality, and failures to report unsuccessful operations. Overall, only 55 percent to 76 percent of the exceptional tests performed generated error codes, depending on the operating system being tested. Approximately 6 percent to 19 percent of tests failed to generate any indication of error despite exceptional inputs. Approximately 1 percent to 3 percent of tests revealed failures to implement defined POSIX functionality for unusual, but specified, situations. Between 18 percent and 33 percent of exceptional tests caused the abnormal termination of an OS system call or library function, and five systems were completely crashed by individual system calls with exceptional parameter values. The most prevalent sources of these robustness failures were illegal pointer values, numeric overflows, and end-of-file overruns.

/pdf/the-exception-handling-effectiveness-of-posix-operating-3qelz6xbqb.pdf

The exception handling effectiveness of POSIX operating systems

Context: With the increased use of software for running key functions in modern society it is of utmost importance to understand software robustness and how to support it. Although there have been many contributions to the field there is a lack of a coherent and summary view. Objective: To address this issue, we have conducted a literature review in the field of robustness. Method: This review has been conducted by following guidelines for systematic literature reviews. Systematic reviews are used to find and classify all existing and available literature in a certain field. Results: From 9193 initial papers found in three well-known research databases, the 144 relevant papers were extracted through a multi-step filtering process with independent validation in each step. These papers were then further analyzed and categorized based on their development phase, domain, research, contribution and evaluation type. The results indicate that most existing results on software robustness focus on verification and validation of Commercial of the shelf (COTS) or operating systems or propose design solutions for robustness while there is a lack of results on how to elicit and specify robustness requirements. The research is typically solution proposals with little to no evaluation and when there is some evaluation it is primarily done with small, toy/academic example systems. Conclusion: We conclude that there is a need for more software robustness research on real-world, industrial systems and on software development phases other than testing and design, in particular on requirements engineering.

http://robertfeldt.net/publications/shahrokni_2013_sysrev_robustness.pdf

A systematic review of software robustness

Critical system designers are turning to off-the-shelf operating system (OS) software to reduce costs and time-to-marker. Unfortunately general-purpose OSes do not always respond to exceptional conditions robustly, either accepting exceptional values without complaint, or suffering abnormal task termination. Even though direct measurement is impractical, this paper uses a multiversion comparison technique to reveal a 6% to 19% normalized rate at which exceptional parameter values cause no error report in commercial POSIX OS implementations. Additionally, 168 functions across 13 OSes are compared to reveal common mode robustness failures. While the best single OS has a 12.6% robustness failure rare for system calls, 3.8% of failures are common across all 13 OSes examined. However, combining C library calls with system calls increases these rates to 29.5% for the best single OS and 17.0% for common mode failures. These results suggest that OS implementations are not completely diverse, and that C library junctions are both less diverse and less robust than system calls.

Comparing the robustness of POSIX operating systems

Lack of data quantifying the performance cost of implementing good exception handling often causes developers to skimp on exception handling based on its overestimated perceived cost. In an effort to remedy this problem we provide performance data on the cost of building good exception handling into software. We use the Safe Fast IO library as a basis for this study. SFIO improves robustness by a factor of 3 to 10 over STDIO without sacrificing performance. We were able to improve the robustness of the critical SFIO functions by another factor of 5, thus quantifying and reducing robustness failure rates by a factor of up to 70 from standard I/O functions, with an average performance penalty of 1% as measured by the original SFIO benchmark scheme. Future processor architecture improvements will further improve checking speed, essentially eliminating performance as an obstacle to improving software robustness.

/pdf/performance-evaluation-of-exception-handling-in-i-o-4q9hh45gmm.pdf

Performance evaluation of exception handling in I/O libraries

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Comparing the robustness of POSIX operating systems

Performance evaluation of exception handling in I/O libraries