Abstract
This paper describes a novel approach to assess detection mechanisms and their diagnostic coverage, implemented using embedded software, designed to identify random hardware failures affecting digital components. In the literature, many proposals adopting fault injection methods are available, with most of them focusing on transient faults and not considering the functional safety standards requirements. This kind of proposal can benefit developers involved in the automotive market, where strict safety and cost requirements make the adoption of software-only strategies convenient. Hence, we have focused our efforts on compliance with the ISO 26262 automotive functional safety standard. The approach concerns permanent faults affecting microcontrollers and it provides a mapping between the failure mode described in part 11 of the Standard and the chosen fault models. We propose a test bench designed to inject permanent failures into an emulated microcontroller and determine which of them are detected by the embedded software. The main contribution of this paper is a novel fault injection manager integrated with the open-source software GCC, GDB, and QEMU. This test bench manages all the assessment phases, from fault generation to fault injection and the ISA emulation management, up to the classification of the simulation results.
Highlights
Nowadays, the growing complexity of the embedded systems employed in different industries to implement safety or mission-critical applications, such as the aerospace, automotive, and defense industries, has increased the interest in making them more reliable
This paper focused on a fault injection system designed to assess the detection mechanisms implemented by the embedded software, designed to recognize random hardware failures affecting digital components
Our test bench has been developed to comply with the International Standard Organization (ISO) 26262 automotive functional safety standard, parts
Summary
The growing complexity of the embedded systems employed in different industries to implement safety or mission-critical applications, such as the aerospace, automotive, and defense industries, has increased the interest in making them more reliable. Hardware hardening components are sold with a type of certification that makes it possible to assume that they have a certain reliability level under certain assumptions (contained in the safety manual), as will be described, software-implemented hardening methods must be tested inside the specific application context For this purpose, the critical point is to assess the method’s performance in RHF detection, referred to in the ISO 26262 standard as diagnostic coverage. The main reason that QEMU has been used in our proposal is to make the test bench agnostic with respect to the specific instruction set, since it can emulate many different ISAs. the authors of [10] decided to modify the emulator to perform fault injection, our approach is not to intervene at this level but to focus only on how to implement fault injection via debugging instruments. The first reason is motivated by the high number of ISAs available in the microcontroller market, whereas the second is to allow the possibility of experimentally determining, through techniques such as hardware-in-the-loop, the timing overhead effects of the chosen hardening techniques when the hardened application runs in the target [14]
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