## Archive for the ‘Fault Tolerance’ Category

### Copilot: a DSL for Monitoring Embedded Systems

September 25, 2010

In case you missed all the excitement on the Galois blog, what follows is a re-post.

# Introducing Copilot

Can you write a list in Haskell? Then you can write embedded C code using Copilot. Here’s a Copilot program that computes the Fibonacci sequence (over Word 64s) and tests for even a numbers:


fib :: Streams
fib = do
"fib" .= [0,1] ++ var "fib" + (drop 1 \$ varW64 "fib")
"t" .= even (var "fib")
where even :: Spec Word64 -> Spec Bool
even w = w mod const 2 == const 0


Copilot contains an interpreter, a compiler, and uses a model-checker to check the correctness of your program. The compiler generates constant time and constant space C code via Tom Hawkin’s Atom Language (thanks Tom!). Copilot is specifically developed to write embedded software monitors for more complex embedded systems, but it can be used to develop a variety of functional-style embedded code.

Executing

> compile fib "fib" baseOpts

generates fib.c and fib.h (with a main() for simulation—other options change that). We can then run

> interpret fib 100 baseOpts

to check that the Copilot program does what we expect. Finally, if we have CBMC installed, we can run

> verify "fib.c"

to prove a bunch of memory safety properties of the generated program.

Galois has open-sourced Copilot (BSD3 licence). More information is available on the Copilot homepage. Of course, it’s available from Hackage, too.

# Flight of the Navigator

Copilot took its maiden flight in August 2010 in Smithfield, Virginia. NASA rents a private airfield for test flights like this, but you have to get past the intimidating sign posted upon entering the airfield. However, once you arrive, there’s a beautiful view of the James River.

We were flying on a RC aircraft that NASA Langley uses to conduct a variety of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) experiments. (It coincidentally had Galois colors!) Our experiments for Copilot were to determine its effectiveness at detecting faults in embedded guidance, navigation, and control software. The test-bed we flew was a partially fault-tolerant pitot tube (air pressure) sensor. Our pitot tube sat at the edge of the wing. Pitot tubes are used on commercial aircraft and they’re a big deal: a number of aircraft accidents and mishaps have been due, in part, to pitot tube failures.

Our experiment consisted of a beautiful hardware stack, crafted by Sebastian Niller of the Technische Universität Ilmenau. Sebastian also led the programming for the stack. The stack consisted of four STM32 ARM Cortex M3 microprocessors. In addition, there was an SD card for writing flight data, and power management. The stack just fit into the hull of the aircraft. Sebastian installed our stack in front of another stack used by NASA on the same flights.

The microprocessors were arranged to provide Byzantine fault-tolerance on the sensor values. One microprocessor acted as the general, receiving inputs from the pitot tube and distributing those values to the other microprocessors. The other microprocessors would exchange their values and perform a fault-tolerant vote on them. Granted, the fault-tolerance was for demonstration purposes only: all the microprocessors ran off the same clock, and the sensor wasn’t replicated (we’re currently working on a fully fault-tolerant system). During the flight tests, we injected (in software) faults by having intermittently incorrect sensor values distributed to various nodes.

The pitot sensor system (including the fault-tolerance code) is a hard real-time system, meaning events have to happen at predefined deadlines. We wrote it in a combination of Tom Hawkin’s Atom, a Haskell DSL that generates C, and C directly.

Integrated with the pitot sensor system are Copilot-generated monitors. The monitors detected

• unexpected sensor values (e.g., the delta change is too extreme),
• the correctness of the voting algorithm (we used Boyer-Moore majority voting, which returns the majority only if one exists; our monitor checked whether a majority indeed exists), and
• whether the majority votes agreed.

The monitors integrated with the sensor system without disrupting its real-time behavior.

We gathered data on six flights. In between flights, we’d get the data from the SD card.

We took some time to pose with the aircraft. The Copilot team from left to right is Alwyn Goodloe, National Institute of Aerospace; Lee Pike, Galois, Inc.; Robin Morisset, École Normale Supérieure; and Sebastian Niller, Technische Universität Ilmenau. Robin and Sebastian are Visiting Scholars at the NIA for the project. Thanks for all the hard work!

There were a bunch of folks involved in the flight test that day, and we got a group photo with everyone. We are very thankful that the researchers at NASA were gracious enough to give us their time and resources to fly our experiments. Thank you!

Finally, here are two short videos. The first is of our aircraft’s takeoff during one of the flights. Interestingly, it has an electric engine to reduce the engine vibration’s effects on experiments.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/15198286

The second is of AirStar, which we weren’t involved in, but that also flew the same day. AirStar is a scaled-down jet (yes, jet) aircraft that was really loud and really fast. I’m posting its takeoff, since it’s just so cool. That thing was a rocket!

http://player.vimeo.com/video/15204969

# More Details

Copilot and the flight test is part of a NASA-sponsored project (NASA press-release) led by Lee Pike at Galois. It’s a 3 year project, and we’re currently in the second year.

# Even More Details

Besides the language and flight test, we’ve written a few papers:

• Lee Pike, Alwyn Goodloe, Robin Morisset, and Sebastian Niller. Copilot: A Hard Real-Time Runtime Monitor. To appear in the proceedings of the 1st Intl. Conference on Runtime Verification (RV’2010), 2010. Springer.

This paper describes the Copilot language.

Byzantine faults are fascinating. Here’s a 2-page paper that shows one reason why.

At the beginning of our work, we tried to survey prior results in the field and discuss the constraints of the problem. This report is a bit lengthy (almost 50 pages), but it’s a gentle introduction to our problem space.

Yes, QuickCheck can be used to test low-level protocols.

A short paper motivating the need for runtime monitoring of critical embedded systems.

# You’re Still Interested?

We’re always looking for collaborators, users, and we may need 1-2 visiting scholars interested in embedded systems & Haskell next summer. If any of these interest you, drop Lee Pike a note (hint: if you read any of the papers or download Copilot, you can find my email).

### 10 to the -9

January 24, 2010

$10^{-9}$, or one-in-a-billion, is the famed number given for the maximum probability of a catastrophic failure, per hour of operation, in life-critical systems like commercial aircraft.  The number is part of the folklore of the safety-critical systems literature; where does it come from?

First, it’s worth noting just how small that number is.  As pointed out by Driscoll et al. in the paper, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, from Theory to Reality, the probability of winning the U.K. lottery is 1 in 10s of millions, and the probability of being struck by lightening (in the U.S.) is $1.6 \times 10^{-6},$ more than a 1,000 times more likely than $10^{-9}.$

So where did $10^{-9}$ come from?  A nice explanation comes from a recent paper by John Rushby:

If we consider the example of an airplane type with 100 members, each flying $3000$ hours per year over an operational life of 33 years, then we have a total exposure of about 107 flight hours. If hazard analysis reveals ten potentially catastrophic failures in each of ten subsystems, then the “budget” for each, if none are expected to occur in the life of the fleet, is a failure probability of about $10^{-9}$ per hour [1, page 37]. This serves to explain the well-known $10^{-9}$ requirement, which is stated as follows: “when using quantitative analyses. . . numerical probabilities. . . on the order of $10^{-9}$ per flight-hour. . . based on a flight of mean duration for the airplane type may be used. . . as aids to engineering judgment. . . to. . . help determine compliance” (with the requirement for extremely improbable failure conditions) [2, paragraph 10.b].

[1] E. Lloyd and W. Tye, Systematic Safety: Safety Assessment of Aircraft Systems. London, England: Civil Aviation Authority, 1982, reprinted 1992.

[2] System Design and Analysis, Federal Aviation Administration, Jun. 21, 1988, advisory Circular 25.1309-1A.

(By the way, it’s worth reading the rest of the paper—it’s the first attempt I know of to formally connect the notions of (software) formal verification and reliability.)

So there a probabilistic argument being made, but let’s spell it out in a little more detail.  If there are 10 potential failures in 10 subsystems, then there are $10 \times 10 = 100$ potential failures.  Thus, there are $2^{100}$ possible configurations of failure/non-failure in the subsystems.  Only one of these configurations is acceptable—the one in which there are no faults.

If the probability of failure is $x,$ then the probability of non-failure is $1 - x.$  So if the probability of failure for each subsystem is $10^{-9},$ then the probability of being in the one non-failure configuration is

$\displaystyle(1 - 10^{-9})^{100}$

We want that probability of non-failure to be greater than the required probability of non-failure, given the total number of flight hours.  Thus,

$\displaystyle (1 - 10^{-9})^{100} > 1 - 10^{-7}$

which indeed holds:

$\displaystyle (1 - 10^{-9})^{100} - (1 - 10^{-7})$

is around $4.95 \times 10^{-15}.$

Can we generalize the inequality?  The hint for how to do so is that the number of subsystems ($100$) is no more than the overall failure rate divided by the subsystem rate:

$\displaystyle \frac{10^{-7}}{10^{-9}}$

This suggests the general form is something like

Subsystem reliability inequality: $\displaystyle (1 - C^{-n})^{C^{n-m}} \geq 1 - C^{-m}$

where $C,$ $n,$ and $m$ are real numbers, $C \geq 1,$ $n \geq 0,$ and $n \geq m.$

Let’s prove the inequality holds.  Joe Hurd figured out the proof, sketched below (but I take responsibility for any mistakes in it’s presentation).  For convenience, we’ll prove the inequality holds specifically when $C = e,$ but the proof can be generalized.

First, if $n = 0,$ the inequality holds immediately. Next, we’ll show that

$\displaystyle (1 - e^{-n})^{e^{n-m}}$

is monotonically non-decreasing with respect to $n$ by showing that the derivative of its logarithm is greater or equal to zero for all $n > 0.$  So the derivative of its logarithm is

$\displaystyle \frac{d}{dn} \; e^{n-m}\ln(1-e^{-n}) = e^{n-m}\ln(1-e^{-n})+\frac{e^{-m}}{1-e^{-n}}$

We show

$\displaystyle e^{n-m}\ln(1-e{-n})+\frac{e^{-m}}{1-e^{-n}} \geq 0$

iff

$\displaystyle e^{-m}\left(e^{n}\ln(1-e^{-n}) + \frac{1}{1-e^{-n}}\right) \geq 0$

and since $e^{-m} \geq 0,$

$\displaystyle e^{n}\ln(1-e^{-n}) + \frac{1}{1-e^{-n}} \geq 0$

iff

$\displaystyle e^{n}\ln(1-e^{-n}) \geq - \frac{1}{1-e^{-n}}$

Let $x = e^{-n}$, so the range of $x$ is $0 < x < 1.$
$\displaystyle\ln(1-x) \geq - \frac{x}{1-x}$

Now we show that in the range of $x$, the left-hand side is bounded below by the right-hand side of the inequality.
$\displaystyle \lim_{x \to 0} \; \ln(1-x) = 0$

and
$\displaystyle - \frac{x}{1-x} = 0$

Now taking their derivatives
$\displaystyle \frac{d}{dx} \; \ln(1-x) = \frac{1}{x-1}$

and
$\displaystyle \frac{d}{dx} \; - \frac{x}{1-x} = - \frac{1}{(x-1)^2}$

Because $\displaystyle x-1 \geq - (x-1)^2$ in the range of $x$, our proof holds.

The purpose of this post was to clarify the folklore of ultra-reliable systems.  The subsystem reliability inequality presented allows for easy generalization to other reliable systems.

Thanks again for the help, Joe! (more…)

### “Schrodinger’s Probability” for Error-Checking Codes

May 15, 2009

In a previous post, I discussed the notion of Schrödinger CRCs, first described by Kevin Driscoll et al. in their paper Byzantine Fault Tolerance, from Theory to Reality. The basic idea is that error-detecting codes do not necessarily prevent two receivers from obtaining messages that are semantically different (i.e., different data) but syntactically valid (i.e., the CRC matches the respective data words received). The upshot is that even with CRCs, you can suffer Byzantine faults, with some probability.

… So what is that probability of a Schrödinger’s CRC? That’s the topic of this post—which cleans up a few of the ideas I presented earlier. I published a short paper on the topic, which I presented at Dependable Sensors and Networks, 2010, while Kevin Driscoll was in the audience!  If you’d prefer to read the PDF or get the slides, they’re here.  The simulation code (Haskell) is here.

View this document on Scribd

### N-Version Programming… For the nth Time

April 27, 2009

Software contains faults.  The question is how to cost-effectively reduce the number of faults.  One approach that gained traction and then fell out of favor was N-version programming.  The basic idea is simple: have developer teams implement a specification independent from one another.  Then we can execute the programs concurrently and compare their results.  If we have, say, three separate programs, we vote their results, and if one result disagrees with the others, we presume that program contained a software bug.

N-version programming rests on the assumption that software bugs in independently-implemented programs are random, statistically-uncorrelated events.  Otherwise, multiple versions are not effective at detecting errors if the different versions are likely to suffer the same errors.

John Knight and Nancy Leveson famously debunked this assumption on which N-version programming rested in the “Knight-Leveson experiment” they published in 1986.  In 1990, Knight and Leveson published a brief summary of the original experiment, as well as responses to subsequent criticisms made about it, in their paper, A Reply to the Criticisms of the Knight & Leveson Experiment.

The problem with N-version programming is subtle: it’s not that it provides zero improvement in reliability but that it provides significantly less improvement than is needed to make it cost-effective compared to other kinds of fault-tolerance (like architecture-level fault-tolerance).  The problem is that even small probabilities of correlated faults lead to significant reductions in potential reliability improvements.

Lui Sha has a more recent (2001) IEEE Software article discussing N-version programming, taking into account that the software development cycle is finite: is it better to spend all your time and money on one reliable implementation or on three implementations that’ll be voted at runtime?  His answer is almost always the former (even if we assume uncorrelated faults!).

But rather than N-versions of the same program, what about different programs compared at runtime?  That’s the basic idea of runtime monitoring.  In runtime monitoring, one program is the implementation and another is the specification; the implementation is checked against the specification at runtime.  This is easier than checking before runtime (in which case you’d have to mathematically prove every possible execution satisfies the specification).  As Sha points out in his article, the specification can be slow and simple.  He gives the example of using the very simple Bubblesort as the runtime specification of the more complex Quicksort: if the Quicksort does its job correctly (in O(n log n), assuming a good pivot element), then checking its output (i.e., a hopefully properly sorted list) with Bubblesort will only take linear time (despite Bubble sort taking O(n2) in general).

The simple idea of simple monitors fascinates me.  Of course, Bubblesort is not a full specification, though.  Although Sha doesn’t suggest it, we’d probably like our monitor to compare the lengths of the input and output lists to ensure that the Quicksort implementation didn’t remove elements.  And there’s still the possibility that the Quicksort implementation modifies elements, which is also unchecked by a Bubblesort monitor.

But instead of just checking the output, we could sort the same input with both Quickcheck and Bubblesort and compare the results.  This is a “stronger” check insofar as different sorts would have to have exactly the same faults (e.g., not sorting, removing elements, changing elements) for an error not to be caught.  The principal drawback is the latency of the slower Bubblesort check as compared to Quicksort.  But sometimes, it may be ok to signal an error (shortly) after a result is provided.

Just like for N-version programming, we would like the faults in our monitor to be statistically uncorrelated with those in the monitored software.  I am left wondering about the following questions:

• Is there research comparing the kinds of programming errors made in radically different paradigms, such as a Haskell and C?  Are there any faults we can claim are statistically uncorrelated?
• Runtime monitoring itself is predicated on the belief that the implementations of different programs will fail in statistically independent ways, just like N-version programming is.  While more plausible, does this assumption hold?

### Byzantine Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC)

April 18, 2009

I’m working on a NASA-sponsored project to monitor safety-critical embedded systems at runtime, and that’s started me thinking about cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs) again.  Error-checking codes are fundamental in fault-tolerant systems.  The basic idea is simple: a transmitter wants to send a data word, so it computes a CRC over the word.  It sends both the data word and the CRC to the receiver, which computes the same CRC over the received word.  If its computed CRC and the received one differ, then there was a transmission error (there are simplifications to this approach, but that’s the basic idea).

CRCs have been around since the 60s, and despite the simple mathematical theory on which they’re built (polynomial division in the Galois Field 2, containing two elements, “0” and “1”), I was surprised to see that even today, their fault-tolerance properties are in some cases unknown or misunderstood.  Phil Koopman at CMU has written a few nice papers over the past couple of years explaining some common misconceptions and analyzing commonly-used CRCs.

Particularly, there seems to be an over-confidence in their ability to detect errors.  One fascinating result is the so-called “Schrödinger’s CRC,” so-dubbed in a paper entitled Byzantine Fault Tolerance, from Theory to Reality, by Kevin Driscoll et al. A Schrödinger’s CRC occurs when a transmitter broadcasts a data word and associated CRC to two receivers.   and at least one of the data words is corrupted in transit and so is the corresponding CRC so that the faulty word and faulty CRC match!  How does this happen?  Let’s look at a concrete example:

             11-Bit Message           USB-5
Receiver A   1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1    0 1 0 0 1
Transmitter  1 ½ 1 1 0 1 1 ½ 0 1 1    ½ 1 0 0 1
Receiver B   1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1    1 1 0 0 1

We illustrate a transmitter broadcasting an 11-bit message to two receivers, A and B. We use USB-5 CRC, generally used to check USB token packets  (by the way, for 11-bit messages, USB-5 has a Hamming Distance of three, meaning the CRC will catch any corruption of fewer than three bits in the combined 11-bit message and CRC).  Now, suppose the transmitter has suffered some fault such as a “stuck-at-1/2” fault so that periodically, the transmitter fails to drive the signal on the bus sufficiently high or low. A receiver may interpret an intermediate signal as either a 0 or 1. In the ﬁgure, we show the transmitter sending three stuck-at-1/2 signals, one in the 11-bit message, and two in CRC.  The upshot is an example in which a CRC does not prevent a Byzantine fault—the two receivers obtain different messages, each of which passes its CRC.

One question is how likely this scenario is.  Paulitsch et al. write that The probability of a Schrödinger’s CRC is hard to evaluate.  A worst-case estimate of its occurrence due to a single device is the device failure rate.”  It’d be interesting to know if there’s any data on this probability.