CCDA: Correcting control-flow and data errors automatically

This paper presents an efficient software technique to detect and correct control-flow errors through addition of redundant codes in a given program. The key innovation performed in the proposed technique is detection and correction of the control-flow errors using both control-flow graph and data-flow graph. Using this technique, most of control-flow errors in the program are detected first, and next corrected, automatically; so, both errors in the control-flow and program data which is caused by control-flow errors can be corrected. In order to evaluate the proposed technique, a post compiler is used, so that the technique can be applied to every 80×86 binaries, transparently. Three benchmarks quick sort, matrix multiplication and linked list are used, and a total of 5000 transient faults are injected on several executable points in each program. The experimental results demonstrate that at least 93% of the control-flow errors can be detected and corrected by the proposed technique automatically without any data error generation. Moreover, the performance and memory overheads of the technique are noticeably less than traditional techniques.