Accelerated Simulated Fault Injection Testing

Abstract

Fault injection testing approaches assess the reliability of execution environments for critical software. They support the early testing of safety concepts that mitigate the impact of hardware failures on software behavior. The growing use of platform software for embedded systems raises the need to verify safety concepts that execute on top of operating systems and middleware platforms. Current fault injection techniques consider the resulting software stack as one black box and attempt to test the reaction of all components in the context of faults. This leads to very high software complexity and consequently requires a very high number of fault injection experiments. Testing the software components, such as control functions, operating systems, and middleware, individually would lead to a significant reduction of the number of experiments required. In this paper, we illustrate our novel approach for fault injection testing, which considers the components of a software stack, enables re-use of previously collected evidences, allows focusing testing on highly critical parts of the control software, and significantly lowers the number of experiments required.