Inherent Diversity in Replicated Architectures
Abstract
In this paper, we report our ongoing investigations of the inherent non-determinism in contemporary execution environments that can potentially lead to divergence in state of a multi-channel hardware/software system. Our approach involved setting up of experiments to study execution path variability of a simple program by tracing its execution at the kernel level. In the first of the two experiments, we analyzed the execution path by repeated execution of the program. In the second, we executed in parallel two instances of the same program, each pinned to a separate processor core. Our results show that for a program executing in a contemporary hardware/software platform , there is sufcient path non-determinism in kernel space that can potentially lead to diversity in replicated architectures. We believe the execution non-determinism can impact the activation of residual systematic faults in software. If this is true, then the inherent diversity can be used together with architectural means to protect safety related systems against residual systematic faults in the operating systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1510.02086,
title = {Inherent Diversity in Replicated Architectures},
author = {Peter Okech and Nicholas Mc Guire and William Okelo-Odongo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.02086},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
in Yann Busnel. 11th European Dependable Computing Conference (EDCC 2015), Sep 2015, Paris, France. 2015, Proceedings of Student Forum - EDCC 2015