Publication Details
Testing Embedded Software Through Fault Injection: Case Study on Smart Lock
Pánek Richard, Ing., Ph.D. (DCSY)
Podivínský Jakub, Ing., Ph.D. (UFYZ)
Čekan Ondřej, Ing., Ph.D. (UFYZ)
Krčma Martin, Ing., Ph.D. (UFYZ)
Kotásek Zdeněk, doc. Ing., CSc.
Electronic Lock, Stepper Motor, Software Fault Injection, Evaluation Environment,
Linux, ARM, x64
The growing chip-level integration results in a higher susceptibility to faults
of today components. This also relates to commonly used storage memories.
A charged particle causes bit flip and a program stored in such memory starts to
behave differently from it was supposed to. Even worse, such bit flips can be
induced also on purpose to tamper with a device. While the so-called smart
devices are becoming still more popular these days, such failure or even
tampering of them is very undesired. A smart electronic lock can serve as an
example. This is why in this paper, we evaluate the consequences of such program
corruption. We target smart lock operation on several computer architectures and
show the results on our case study observing the change of the lock behavior. We
present our Evaluation Environment that is able to connect with single-board
computers and evaluation kits to test the SW behavior on them, which is done
under the presence of faults in the tested SW. Our results indicate that the most
sensitive part of a program is generally the loading of shared libraries. Problem
in this process results in inability to load the program. Segmentation Fault and
early termination of the program (e.g. problem in the logic of motor cycle
counting) is also serious. The least problematic, according to our observations,
is the syntactic error in the output data. In such cases, the motor driver
ignores corrupted commands and the motor move is not smooth. Certain findings
from the experimental part of this paper, can be generalized to other devices as
well.
@inproceedings{BUT175783,
author="Jakub {Lojda} and Richard {Pánek} and Jakub {Podivínský} and Ondřej {Čekan} and Martin {Krčma} and Zdeněk {Kotásek}",
title="Testing Embedded Software Through Fault Injection: Case Study on Smart Lock",
booktitle="2021 IEEE 22nd Latin American Test Symposium, LATS 2021",
year="2021",
pages="80--85",
publisher="Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers",
address="Punta del Este",
doi="10.1109/LATS53581.2021.9651770",
isbn="978-1-6654-2057-0",
url="https://www.fit.vut.cz/research/publication/12503/"
}