RIFLE: A general purpose pin-level fault injector

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.