Design of a portable control-flow checking technique

Abstract

A software-based method for concurrent detection of hardware faults via control-flow checking is presented. The method is capable of detecting all single control flow errors and almost all multiple control flow errors, regardless of the type of fault that caused the error. It is implemented by means of adding assertions to the entry and exit points of each branch-free interval of the high-level source code. This method is portable across architectures and does not require any special hardware for its application. The assertions are placed automatically through the use of a preprocessor.