Software-Implemented Fault Injection at Firmware Level

Software-implemented fault injection is an established method to emulate hardware faults in computer systems. Existing approaches typically extend the operating system by special drivers or change the application under test. We propose a novel approach where fault injection capabilities are added to the computer firmware. This approach can work without any modification to operating system and / or applications, and can support a larger variety of fault locations. We discuss four different strategies in X86/X64 and Itanium systems. Our analysis shows that such an approach can increase portability, the non-intrusiveness of the injector implementation, and the number of supported fault locations. Firmware-level fault injection paves the way for new research directions, such as virtual machine monitor fault injection or the investigation of certified operating systems.