AN-Encoding Compiler: Building Safety-Critical Systems with Commodity Hardware

In the future, we expect commodity hardware to be used in safety-critical applications. However, in the future commodity hardware is expected to become less reliable and more susceptible to soft errors because of decreasing feature size and reduced power supply. Thus, software-implemented approaches to deal with unreliable hardware will be needed. To simplify the handling of value failures, we provide failure virtualization in the sense that we transform arbitrary value failures caused by erroneous execution into fail-stop failures. The latter ones are easier to handle. Therefore, we use the arithmetic AN-code because it provides very good error detection capabilities. Arithmetic codes are suitable for the protection of commodity hardware because guarantees can be provided independent of the executing hardware. This paper presents the encoding compiler EC-AN which applies AN-encoding to arbitrary programs. According to our knowledge, this is the first in software implemented complete AN-encoding. Former encoding compilers either encode only small parts of applications or trade-off safety to enable complete AN-encoding.