Software Diversity and Fault-Tolerance: An Overview

The design of reliable and fault-free software is of a major concern for safety-critical real-time and distributed applications. The fault tolerant community addresses these problems through redundancy in hardware components and by diversity, using different software components. Diversity has been used for many years now as a computer defence mechanism to achieve an acceptable degree of fault-tolerance against flaws introduced in design and provides security to software systems. In this paper we give a comprehensive overview of the fault-tolerance techniques based on the design and data diversity approaches. Furthermore, we provide our work with some real applications which implement some of the fault-tolerance methods highlighted within this paper.