An Enhanced Method for Detecting Control Flow Errors Caused by Soft Errors in the Processors Running the Programs

The processing systems utilized in the satellites or nuclear reactors are highly susceptible to produce wrong results because of the existence of different radiations. In this paper, a new method is proposed for enhancing the program executions on the fault-prone processors in extreme environments. The main goal is the detection of control flow errors caused by soft errors that maybe produced by transient faults occurred in the underlying hardware. This method detects the errors by recognizing the deviations from the proper program flow execution. The proposed method operates by allocating two specific signatures and at most three control instructions to each basic block inside a program. This way, many control flow errors are detected. The experimental results based on the simulation of the proposed method together with the previous methods show that the proposed method detects the control flow errors better than the previous methods with respect to three main parameters including fault coverage, performance overhead and memory overhead.