FlexFi: A flexible fault injection environment for microprocessor-based systems

Microprocessor-based systems are increasingly used to control safety-critical systems (e.g., air and railway traffic control, nuclear plant control, aircraft and car control). In this case, fault tolerance mechanisms are introduced at the hardware and software level. Debugging and verifying the correct design and implementation of these mechanisms ask for effective environments, and Fault Injection represents a viable solution for their implementation. In this paper we present a flexible environment suitable to compute the fault coverage provided by hardware and software mechanisms existing in most microprocessor-based systems. The environment, called FlexFI, is flexible, since it allows the adoption of different solutions for implementing the most critical modules, which differ in terms of cost, speed, and intrusiveness in the original system behavior.