Karthik Pattabiraman, Nithin Nakka, Zbigniew Kalbarczyk and Ravishankar Iyer, Proceedings of the International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2008.
This paper won the William C. Carter award for the best paper at the conference
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You can find the tech report for the conference paper here.
Abstract: This paper introduces SymPLFIED, a program-level framework which allows specification of arbitrary error detectors and the verification of their efficacy against hardware errors. SymPLFIED comprehensively enumerates all transient hardware errors in registers, memory and computation (expressed as value errors) that potentially evade detection and cause program failure. The framework uses symbolic execution to abstract the state of erroneous values in the program and model checking to comprehensively find all errors that evade detection. We demonstrate the use of SymPLFIED on a widely deployed aircraft collision avoidance application, tcas. Our results show that the SymPLFIED framework can be used to uncover hard-to-detect corner cases caused by transient errors in programs that may not be exposed by random fault-injection based validation.
The Coordinated Science Lab at UIUC did an article about this paper
