Soft-error detection using control flow assertions

Over the last few years, an increasing number of safety-critical tasks have been demanded of computer systems. In this paper, a software-based approach for developing safety-critical applications is analyzed. The technique is based on the introduction of additional executable assertions to check the correct execution of the program control flow. By applying the proposed technique, several benchmark applications have been hardened against transient errors. Fault injection campaigns have been performed to evaluate the fault detection capability of the proposed technique in comparison with state-of-the-art alternative assertion-based methods. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is far more effective than the other considered techniques in terms of fault detection capability, at the cost of a limited increase in memory requirements and in performance overhead.