Computer control of discrete applications present a challenging dependability problem since any wrong output may lead the system to a completely anomalous state. This is in contrast with continuous feedback systems where wrong outputs can only gradually deviate the system under control from its intended set point. Transient errors may even be filtered by the latency inherent to the physical app...

We propose a number of techniques for securing finite state machines (FSMs) against fault injection attacks. The proposed security mechanisms are based on physically unclonable functions (PUFs), and they address different fault injection threats on various parts of the FSM. The first mechanism targets the protection of state-transitions in a specific class of FSMs. The second mechanism addresse...

With shrinking device size and increasing complexity, soft errors are becoming an issue in the reliability of digital systems. To make efficient robust systems, it is important to understand how soft errors affect the quality of output for the target applications. Probabilistic inference applications are interesting since they produce non-exact results and yet are useful in many different field...

Injection vulnerabilities pose a major threat to applicationlevel security. Some of the more common types are SQL injection, crosssite scripting and shell injection vulnerabilities. Existing methods for defending against injection attacks, that is, attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities, rely heavily on the application developers and are therefore error-prone. In this paper we introduce CSSE,...

Transient displacement of blood in vessel lumen with saline injection is necessary in the conductance method for measurement of arterial cross-sectional area (CSA). The displacement of blood is dictated by the interactions between arterial flow hemodynamics and saline injection dynamics. The objective of the present study is to understand how the accuracy of conductance measurements is affected...

As GPUs become more pervasive in both scalable high-performance computing systems and safety-critical embedded systems, evaluating and analyzing their resilience will grow increasingly important. As soft errors, such as those caused by high-energy particle strikes, form an important fraction of in-field hardware errors, GPU designers must develop tools and techniques to understand the effect of...

This paper describes a fully automated pre-injection analysis technique aimed at reducing the cost of fault injection campaigns. The technique optimizes the fault-space by utilizing assembly-level knowledge of the target system in order to place single bit-flips in registers and memory locations only immediately before these are read by the executed instructions. This way, faults (time-location...

The discussion in this paper focuses on the issues involved in analyzing the availability of networked systems using fault injection and the failure data collected by the logging mechanisms built into the system. In particular we address: (1) analysis in the prototype phase using physical fault injection to an actual system. We use example of fault injection-based evaluation of a software-imple...

Many programs have named configuration options. If users misunderstand what an option does, or type the name wrong, the program will malfunction. These malfunctions are configuration errors and often result in error messages. Even when an error message is uniquely caused by a particular problem, it may not tell the user how to proceed. Bad error messages are a major problem in configuration deb...

We present a framework that facilitates synthesis and validation of fail-safe fault-tolerant programs. Starting from a fault-intolerant program, with safety specification SS, that satisfies its specification in the absence of faults, we present an approach that automatically transforms it into a fail-safe fault-tolerant program, through the addition of a class of detectors termed as SS-globally...