Fault injection techniques and tools

Fault injection is important to evaluating the dependability of computer systems. Researchers and engineers have created many novel methods to inject faults, which can be implemented in both hardware and software. The contrast between the hardware and software methods lies mainly in the fault injection points they can access, the cost and the level of perturbation. Hardware methods can inject faults into chip pins and internal components, such as combinational circuits and registers that are not software-addressable. On the other hand, software methods are convenient for directly producing changes at the software-state level. Thus, we use hardware methods to evaluate low-level error detection and masking mechanisms, and software methods to test higher level mechanisms. Software methods are less expensive, but they also incur a higher perturbation overhead because they execute software on the target system.