This paper describes and compares three physical fault injection techniques—heavy-ion radiation, pin-level injection, and electromagnetic interference—and their use in the validation of MARS, a fault-tolerant distributed real-time system. The main features of the injection techniques are first summarised and analysed, and then the MARS error detection mechanisms are described. The distributed t...

This paper presents a fault simulation algorithm that uses efficient partial reconfiguration of FPGAs. The methodology is particularly useful for evaluation of BIST effectiveness, and for applications in which multiple fault injection is mandatory, such as safety-critical applications. A novel fault collapsing methodology is proposed, which efficiently leads to the minimal stuck-at fault list a...

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 thesis investigates the issues of testing software-implemented fault tolerance mechanisms of distributed systems through fault injection. A fault injection method has been developed. The method requires th...

This paper aims at validating the efficiency of a fault injection approach to predict error rate on applications devoted to operate in radiation environment. Soft error injection experiments and radiation ground testing were performed on software modules using a digital board built on a digital signal processor which is included in a satellite instrument. The analysis of experimental results pu...

Fault injection is a widely used method for evaluating dependable systems. The intention of this paper is to compare typical fault models used for fault injection regarding their accuracy in predicting the reliability of the system. For this purpose, we set up an experiment by injecting faults in a VHDL model of the DP32-processor at gate-level, pin-level and at register-transfer level. The exp...

This report presents the results of the Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) Project. The project was funded by Secure Business Austria (SBA) and A-SIT. Its objective was to perform basic steps in the field of fault injection. The effect of faults was investigated in theory as well as in practice. The first part of this report concentrates on theoretical fault models. New fault attacks on public k...

This paper describes a new methodology to inject transient and permanent faults in digital systems. For this purpose, the simulation based fault injector VERIFY (VHDL-based Evaluation of Reliability by Injecting Faults efficientlY) has been developed, which allows fault injection at several abstraction levels of a digital system. The combined approach of injection and analysis of the results en...

Fault tolerance is an essential part in the design of distributed computer systems [2]. Thus, testing algorithms for such systems often involves fault injection (FI) experiments to evaluate if the specified fault hypothesis holds for the implementation, i.e., faults can be seen as part of the valid input data of a fault-tolerant system. Basically, the different methods of FI can be grouped into...

This paper describes a new methodology to inject transient and permanent faults in digital systems. For this purpose, the simulation based fault injector VERIFY (VHDL-based Evaluation of Reliability by Injecting Faults efficientlY) has been developed, which allows fault injection at several abstraction levels of a digital system. The combined approach of injection and analysis of the results en...

Evaluating the faulty behavior of loiv-cost microprocessor-based boards is an increasingly important issue, due to their usage in nun2 safety critical systems. To address this issue. the paper describes a Software-implemented Fault Injection system based on the trace exception mode available in most microprocessors. The architecture of the complete Fault Injection environment is proposed, integ...