Automatic Implementation of Control Flow Error Detection Techniques

Abstract

Modern embedded systems are prone to erroneous bit-flips introduced in its hardware by external disturbances such as alpha particles, electromagnetic interference or intentional external attackers. In order to protect embedded systems against these disturbances, a wide variety of software-implemented detection techniques have been proposed, a.o. by the authors of this paper. Implementing those techniques, however, can be arduous and error-prone since they have to be implemented in low-level code, e.g. assembly. To overcome this problem we propose a compiler extension, in the form of a plugin, that can automatically add any supported technique to the low-level code of the target program. We discuss the internal working of our compiler extension and conclude with a demonstration using an example program and validate the effectiveness of the introduced countermeasures by running a fault injection campaign.