On-line control flow error detection using relationship signatures among basic blocks

Computer systems operating in space environment are subject to different radiation phenomena, whose effects may lead to a control flow fault occurring in software system, which can cause unpredictable behaviors of computer-based systems. According to the specialty of space environment, We propose a technique called RSCFC (Relationship Signatures for Control Flow Checking) which is based on the partition of programs into basic blocks. Firstly, it exploits the relationship among the blocks, then assigns a signature, into which the relationship is coded, to each basic block. Control flow faults are detected through taking AND operation between the run-time signature and the location info of the current block with extra instructions induced at the beginning and the end of each block. A fault injection experiment was performed with several C benchmark programs. The result suggests that about 33% (20.7–68.8%) of the injected branching faults produced undetected incorrect outputs without RSCFC; however, with RSCFC, the above number declines to 11% (2.8–20.4%). Compared with previous techniques, RSCFC has the characteristics of both high fault coverage and low memory and performance overhead.