Hardware Runtime Verification of a RTOS Kernel: Evaluation Using Fault Injection

Abstract

Nowadays complete systems can be built on a System-on-a-Programmable-Chip that integrates a microcontroller and a FPGA fabric into a single chip. Beside its traditional use to implement hardware accelerators, the FPGA can be used to monitor the software running on the microcontroller with a very small overhead. In this work, we investigate the case of monitoring safety properties. We have synthesized a runtime verification system to verify a part of the behavior of a real-time operating system. The paper presents the coverage provided by this approach with regards to transient hardware faults. The evaluation is based on an ISA-level fault injection campaign.