Fault Injection Scheme for Embedded Systems at Machine Code Level and Verification

In order to evaluate software from the third party whose source codes are not available, after a careful analysis of the statistic data sorted by orthogonal defect classification, and the corresponding relation between patterns of high level language programs and machine codes, we propose a fault injection scheme at machine code level suitable respectively to the IA32 ARM and MIPS architecture, which takes advantage of mutating machine code. To prove the feasibility and validity of this scheme, two sets of programs are chosen as our experimental target: Set I consists of two different versions of triangle testing algorithms, and Set II is a subset of the Mibench which is a collection of performance benchmark programs designed for embedded systems; we inject both high level faults into the source code written in C language and the corresponding machine code level faults directly into the executables, and monitor their running on Linux. The results from experiments show that at least 96% of total similarity degree is obtained. Therefore, we conclude that the effect of injecting corresponding faults on both the source code level and machine code level are mostly the same. Therefore, our scheme is rather useful in analyzing system behavior under faults.