Quantifying software vulnerability

ABSTRACT

The technique known as ACE Analysis allows researchers to quantify a hardware structure's Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) using simulation. This allows researchers to understand a hardware structure's vulnerability to soft errors and consider design tradeoffs when running specific workloads. AVF is only applicable to hardware, however, and no corresponding concept has yet been introduced for software. Quantifying vulnerability to hardware faults at a software, or program, level would allow researchers to gain a better understanding of the reliability of a program as run on a particular architecture (e.g., X86, PowerPC), independent of the micro-architecture on which it is executed. This ability can provide a basis for future research into reliability techniques at a software level.

In this work, we adapt the techniques of ACE Analysis to develop a new software-level vulnerability metric called the Program Vulnerability Factor (PVF). This metric allows insight into the vulnerability of a software resource to hardware faults in a micro-architecture independent way, and can be used to make judgments about the relative reliability of different programs. We describe in detail how to calculate the PVF of a software resource, and show that the PVF of the architectural register file closely correlates with the AVF of the underlying physical register file and can serve as a good predictor of relative AVF when comparing the AVF of two different programs.

References

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Index Terms

• Hardware

  • Hardware test

  • Robustness