Fault injection and attack injection

Fault injection is used in as an assessment activity to evaluate the effectiveness of error handling mechanisms. Moreover, fault injection is either recommended or highly recommended in many standards related to the development of dependable systems, for example, ISO 13849, IEC 61508 and ISO 26262.

In this course, we explain how fault and attack injection could be used for validation of dependability and security attributes of related systems and components. The course is designed and given by lecturers who have a combined experience of more than 30 years in the area.

Goal & purpose

The course focuses on the increase of knowledge and understanding of the participants on how fault and attack injection could be used for dependability validation of computer systems. This is done through presentation of techniques and tools that one could use to be able to inject faults and attacks into computer systems. Moreover, we discuss how the results of the fault and attack injection experiments could be classified, i.e., what are systems’ failure modes. The advantages and disadvantages of different injection techniques and tools will also be discussed.

Target group & expected prior knowledge

The course is suitable for hardware experts, software developers, testers as well as early-stage engineers and researchers involved in development of dependable computer systems. Basic knowledge of hardware and software is required.

Content

During the day, the lecturers will go through the (i) background with a focus on dependability and security threats, dependability validation, and failure modes; (ii) physical and simulation-based fault injection techniques; (iii) state-of-the-art research on fault injection such as error space pruning and error propagation; and (iv) demo of fault and attack injection using MODIFI (Model-implemented Fault and attack Injection) tool.