Modeling and evaluation of control flow vulnerability in the embedded system

Abstract

Faults in control flow-changing instructions are critical for correct execution because the faults could change the behavior of programs very differently from what they are expected to show. The conventional techniques to deal with control flow vulnerability typically add extra instructions to detect control flow-related faults, which increase both static and dynamic instructions, consequently, execution time and energy consumption. In contrast, we make our own control flow vulnerability model to evaluate the effects of different compiler optimizations. We find that different programs show very different degrees of control flow vulnerabilities and some compiler optimizations have high correlation to control flow vulnerability. The results observed in this work can be used to generate more resilient code against control flow-related faults.