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An Investigation of the Impact of Double Single Bit-Flip Errors on Program Executions

Authors:
Fatimah Adamu-Fika
Arshad Jhumka

Keywords: Multiple bit-flip errors; Fault injection; Failure profile; Evaluation

Abstract:
This paper investigates a novel variant of the double bit errors fault model and studies its impact on program execution. Current works have addressed the problem of both random bit upsets occurring in the same location (a given memory word or register). In contrast, we randomly select two locations and flip a single bit at each location, which we call Double Single Bit-flip (DSB) variant. We then evaluate the viability of this new variant in uncovering vulnerabilities in soft- ware (SW). As a baseline for comparison, we inject traditional single bit-flip (SBF) errors in registers. To better understand the impact of the injected faults on SW, we classify the behaviour of the program in five possible failure categories. Our results, based on nearly a million fault-injection experiments, show that (i) DSB causes a significantly higher proportion of SW failures than SBF errors, (ii) a large proportion of those failures was crash failure and (iii) under DSB, the proportion of silent data corruptions (SDC) varies significantly between programs from different application areas. The failure profile induced by DSB is very different to other fault models, such as SBF

Pages: 15 to 22

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: August 23, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4324

ISBN: 978-1-61208-429-9

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from August 23, 2015 to August 28, 2015