A Software Fault Injector to Validate Implementations of a Safety Communication Protocol

摘要

Communication faults can lead to irreparable damages. Faulty messages increase the risk of accidents in distributed industrial environments. When the risk is high, safety standards force communication over safety protocols. For each new controller, input and output device, a new implementation of a safety protocol is required. Its validation must strictly follow safety standards, which imposes fault injection to test the protocol. This paper introduces a communication fault injector to validate implementations of PROFIsafe, one of the safety protocols standardized by IEC 61784-3. To meet low cost and minor intrusiveness requirements, the injector was developed in software and uses an efficient kernel module, PF-RING, to capture messages directly from network interfaces. A complete functional version of the injector is ready to use and was applied to validate a prototype implementation of PROFIsafe.