research-article

FlashBox: a system for logging non-deterministic events in deployed embedded systems

Authors:

Siddharth Choudhuri,

Tony GivargisAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 1676 - 1682

https://doi.org/10.1145/1529282.1529657

Published: 08 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The ability to postmortem failures in deployed systems due to non-deterministic events is useful in crash investigations. With this goal in mind, we propose FlashBox - a system that acts as a black box for embedded systems, recording non-deterministic events (interrupts). The FlashBox hardware consists of a microcontroller and flash memory. The FlashBox software is an extension to a compiler, enabling recording capabilities at various granularities. There are no source code modifications required to use FlashBox and no assumptions made on processor capabilities such as hardware counters. The FlashBox log can be used for faithful replay with a goal to isolate faults and reason about failure.

We present a prototype implementation of FlashBox that logs non-deterministic events on an AVR ATMega169 microcontroller. The FlashBox prototype consists of a 8051 microcontroller with flash memory. The avr-gcc compiler has been extended to log non-deterministic events. Based on our experimental results, FlashBox results in 10-23% overhead while providing capability to log non-deterministic events at instruction level granularity. With decreasing cost of flash memories, FlashBox provides a low cost logging mechanism. The use of standard I/O communication protocols enhances portability, enabling ease of integration for different classes of embedded systems.

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cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing

March 2009

2347 pages

ISBN:9781605581668

DOI:10.1145/1529282

Conference Chairs:
Sung Y. Shin
South Dakota State University, United States
,
Sascha Ossowski
University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 March 2009

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March 8, 2009 - March 12, 2008

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/RTEST49666.2020.9140117
Bagchi SAbdelzaher TGovindan RShenoy PAtrey AGhosh PXu R(2020)New Frontiers in IoT: Networking, Systems, Reliability, and Security ChallengesIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2020.30076907:12(11330-11346)Online publication date: Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2020.3007690
Taurer SDieber BSchartner P(2018)Secure Data Recording and Bio-Inspired Functional Integrity for Intelligent Robots2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS.2018.8593994(8723-8728)Online publication date: Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2018.8593994
Winfield AJirotka M(2017)The Case for an Ethical Black BoxTowards Autonomous Robotic Systems10.1007/978-3-319-64107-2_21(262-273)Online publication date: 20-Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64107-2_21
Capella JCampelo JBonastre AOrs R(2016)A Reference Model for Monitoring IoT WSN-Based ApplicationsSensors10.3390/s1611181616:11(1816)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2016
https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111816
Pommerenke DMaheshwari P(2016)Soft Failure Mechanisms and PCB Design MeasuresSystem Level ESD Co‐Design10.1002/9781118861899.ch6(169-233)Online publication date: 13-May-2016
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Tancreti MSundaram VBagchi SEugster PNath SKrishnamachari BRowe A(2015)TARDISProceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks10.1145/2737095.2737096(286-297)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2015
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Hossain MLee WRaghunathan VJerraya ACarloni LChang NFummi F(2012)SPI-SNOOPERProceedings of the eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis10.1145/2380445.2380460(53-62)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2012
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Gracioli GFischmeister S(2012)Tracing and recording interrupts in embedded softwareJournal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal10.1016/j.sysarc.2012.06.00358:9(372-385)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2012
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