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Robust assertions and fail-bounded behavior

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 10, pages 18–30 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

In this paper the behavior of assertion-based error detection mechanisms is characterized under faults injected according to a quite general fault model. Assertions based on the knowledge of the application can be very effective at detecting corruption of critical data caused by hardware faults. The main drawbacks of that approach are identified as being the lack of protection of data outside the section covered by assertions, namely during input and output, and the possible incorrect execution of the assertions.

To handle those weak-points the Robust Assertions technique is proposed, whose effectiveness is shown by extensive fault injection experiments. With this technique a system follows a new failure model, that is called Fail-Bounded, where with high probability all results produced are either correct or, if wrong, they are within a certain bound of the correct value, whose exact distance depends on the output assertions used.

Any kind of assertions can be considered, from simple likelihood tests to high coverage assertions such as those used in the Algorithm Based Fault Tolerance paradigm. We claim that this failure model is very useful to describe the behavior of many low-cost fault-tolerant systems, that have low hardware and software redundancy, like embedded systems, were cost is a severe restriction, yet full availability is expected.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dep. Informática /IT/CISUC, Universidade da Beira Interior, Rua Marquês d’ Ávila e Bolama, P- 6200, Covilhã, Portugal

    Paula Prata

  2. Dep. Eng. Informática /CISUC, Universidade de Coimbra, Pinhal de Marrocos, P-3030, Coimbra, Portugal

    Mario Rela, Henrique Madeira & João Gabriel Silva

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Prata, P., Rela, M., Madeira, H. et al. Robust assertions and fail-bounded behavior. J Braz Comp Soc 10, 18–30 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192363

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