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Towards Dynamic Software Diversity for Resilient Redundant Embedded Systems

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Software Engineering for Resilient Systems (SERENE 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9274))

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Abstract

Faults in embedded systems are on the rise due to shrinking hardware feature sizes, increasing software complexity, and security vulnerabilities. Since such faults cannot be completely prevented, systems have to cope with their effects. Frequently, redundancy is used to achieve fault tolerance. However, with homogeneous redundancy common-cause faults such as software bugs or hardware faults in shared resources are not tolerated - diversity is needed.

In this paper, we highlight the potential of automatically introducing diversity via dynamic software diversity techniques. Recently, these techniques have attracted attention in the security domain. Furthermore, we present the idea of using such dynamic software diversity methods to create feedback-based systems that are able to adapt the execution of the program in such a way that the consequences of faults are leveraged. Finally, we demonstrate the approach with two use cases. We show that by using address space layout randomization - a widespread technique to prevent malicious attacks - it is possible to detect memory-related software bugs during runtime. Additionally, we illustrate the idea of adaptive dynamic software diversity by showing a simple example of how to recover from common-cause faults in the address decoder via software by inserting memory gaps with adjustable size.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Technical Informatics, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Andrea Höller, Tobias Rauter, Johannes Iber & Christian Kreiner

Authors
  1. Andrea Höller
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  2. Tobias Rauter
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  3. Johannes Iber
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  4. Christian Kreiner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrea Höller .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Florence, Firence, Italy

    Alessandro Fantechi

  2. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburgh, Sweden

    Patrizio Pelliccione

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Höller, A., Rauter, T., Iber, J., Kreiner, C. (2015). Towards Dynamic Software Diversity for Resilient Redundant Embedded Systems. In: Fantechi, A., Pelliccione, P. (eds) Software Engineering for Resilient Systems. SERENE 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9274. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23129-7_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23129-7_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23128-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23129-7

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