A Survey of QEMU-Based Fault Injection Tools & Techniques for Emulating Physical Faults

Fault Injection (FI) is a method used to quantify the reliability and resilience of a system by assessing the system’s ability to detect, locate, and/or mitigate fault occurrences. At the architecture level, targeted bit flips at specific times and locations can help quantify the response of a running application to unwanted changes in state and memory values. FI campaigns of this type can be performed on the target hardware virtual implementations of the target device. In this paper, we present a survey of Quick EMUlator (QEMU) based FI techniques. After discussing the various techniques proposed by academia and industry, we classified them into categories and compare their attributes. This review will help researchers understand the capabilities and limitations of using the QEMU emulator for FI-based system reliability analysis. Additionally, we identify the gaps in existing techniques and propose opportunities for extensions.