Focused fault injection testing of software implemented fault tolerance mechanisms of Voltan TMR nodes

Abstract

One way of gaining confidence in the adequacy of fault tolerance mechanisms of a system is to test the system by injecting faults and see how the system performs under faulty conditions. This paper presents an application of the focused fault injection method that has been developed for testing software implemented fault tolerance mechanisms of distributed systems. The method exploits the object oriented approach of software implementation to support the injection of specific classes of faults. With the focused fault injection method, the system tester is able to inject specific classes of faults (including malicious ones) such that the fault tolerance mechanisms of a target system can be tested adequately. The method has been applied to test the design and implementation of voting, clock synchronization, and ordering modules of the Voltan TMR (triple modular redundant) node. The tests performed uncovered three flaws in the system software.