2012 IEEE 18th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing

The evolution of systems during their operational lifetime is becoming ineluctable. Dependable systems, which continuously deliver trustworthy services, must evolve in order to comply with changes having different origins, e.g. new fault tolerance requirements, or changes in available resources. These evolutions must not violate their dependability properties, which leads to the notion of resilien... View full abstract»

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular by obviating the need for users to own and maintain complex computing infrastructure. However, due to their inherent complexity and large scale, production cloud computing systems are prone to various runtime problems caused by hardware and software failures. Dependability assurance is crucial for building sustainable cloud computing services. Althou... View full abstract»

Large-scale disasters may cause simultaneous failures of many components in information systems. In the design for disaster recovery, operational procedures to recover from simultaneous component failures need to be determined so as to satisfy the time-to-recovery objective within the limited budget. For this purpose, it is beneficial to identify the minimal unacceptable combination of component f... View full abstract»

Although the need for the exactly-once request-response interaction pattern is ubiquitous in distributed systems, making it work in practice is anything but simple. Ensuring the at-most-once part of the invocation is relatively easy. Unfortunately, the same is not true for the at-least-once guarantee, which depends on the recovery from crashes of the client, the server and the network. This is wha... View full abstract»

Recently, even operating systems are often compromised by the attackers. Since a compromised operating system affects all the applications including security software on top of it, the integrity of the operating system should be guaranteed. However, it is difficult to monitor the operating system securely. In this paper, we propose SPE Observer, which is a framework for securely monitoring operati... View full abstract»

Despite the numerous prevention and protection techniques that have been developed, the exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities still represents a serious threat to the security of software systems and networks. Because of the adoption of the write or execute only policy (W⊕X) and address space layout randomization (ASLR), modern operate systems have been strengthened against code inject... View full abstract»

A systematic process for eliciting safety trigger conditions is presented. Starting from a risk analysis of the monitored system, critical transitions to catastrophic system states are identified and handled in order to specify safety margins on them. The conditions for existence of such safety margins are given and an alternative solution is proposed if no safety margin can be defined. The propos... View full abstract»

This paper develops and validates a methodology to detect small, incipient faults in software systems. Incipient faults such as memory leaks slowly deteriorate the software's performance over time and if left undetected, the end result is usually a complete system failure. The proposed method combines tools from information theory and statistics: entropy and principal component analysis (PCA). The... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a model checking-based approach to verification of asynchronous consensus algorithms, an important class of distributed fault-tolerant algorithms. The proposed approach can be used to verify these algorithms against agreement, which is the key safety property of this class of algorithms. A consensus algorithm typically has runs of unbounded length and unbounded queues or sets o... View full abstract»

Soft error rate (SER) of various radiation hardened latches is analyzed by simulation. SER is estimated by modeling the variety of current pulses triggered by particle strikes such as neutrons from space or alpha particles using Monte Carlo method. By using proposed method, we show that SER of various latches is accurately analyzed without conducting irradiation experiments. As for the soft error ... View full abstract»

We present a self-repairing circuit for a mesh-connected processor array with faulty processing elements which are directly replaced by spare processing elements on two orthogonal lines at the edges of the array. First, the spare assignment problem is formalized as a matching problem in graph theory. Using the result, we present an algorithm for reconstructing the array in a convenient form for fi... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a multi-chip NoC approach for implementing centralized ECUs. Unlike the conventional approach where ECUs and sensors/actuators are connected tightly, it has potential to implement efficient and reliable systems for automotive applications. Then, this paper reports our experience of implementing our first chip designed for the multi-chip NoC platform, and shows some experimental... View full abstract»

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is now considered to be a promising approach to implementing many-core systems and some real-time applications are executed on them. However, it has not yet been proven that on-chip networks can theoretically satisfy the hard real-time constraints. In this paper, we propose the worst-case performance models of on-chip networks which represent the upper bound latency between N... View full abstract»

We consider the problem of finding an allocation of program modules to computing nodes in a network. The objective of this problem is to maximize the probability of successfully executing these modules. Nodes and links of the network are assumed to be subject to failures. We propose an algorithm for this problem which uses Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) extensively. BDDs have been used as a power... View full abstract»

This paper releases a report of the application for the fault tolerant sequential circuit technique against periodical transient faults under highly electromagnetic environment. After implementing the proposed fault tolerant technique on a counter in our previous paper, as an example of how the proposed architecture performs on utility-scale sequential circuits, the result obtained by applying the... View full abstract»