Fast dynamic fault injection for virtual microcontroller platforms

Electronic systems, like they are embedded in road vehicles, have to be compliant to functional safety standards like ISO 26262 [1], which limit the impacts of malfunctions for safety critical systems. ISO 26262, for instance, defines different safety levels for road vehicles, which require different means and measures for a safety compliant system and its development process like risk analysis and fault effect simulation. For fault effect simulation it is important to investigate the impact of physical and hardware related effects to the correct function of a system. This article first studies code and model mutations for fault injection in the context of fault effect simulation through different system abstraction levels. It demonstrates how high level mutations correlate to bit flips of software binaries by examples from the TriCore™ instruction set and finally presents a virtual platform based implementation for automated injection of bit flip based mutations into software binaries. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the implemented approach.