Data resource sharing can guarantee the reliable and safe operation of distribution power grid. However, it faces the challenges of low security and high delay in the sharing process. Consortium blockchain can ensure the security and efficiency of data resource sharing, but it still faces problems such as arbitrary master node selection and high consensus delay. In this paper, we propose an improved practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm based on intelligent consensus node selection to realize high-security and real-time data resource sharing for distribution power grid. Firstly, a blockchain-based data resource sharing model is constructed to realize secure data resource storage by combining the consortium blockchain and interplanetary file system (IPFS). Then, the improved PBFT consensus algorithm is proposed to optimize the consensus node selection based on the upper confidence bound of node performance. It prevents Byzantine nodes from participating in the consensus process, reduces the consensus delay, and improves the security of data resource sharing. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Highly conflicting evidence that may lead to the counter-intuitive results is one of the challenges for information fusion in Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. To deal with this issue, evidence conflict is investigated based on belief divergence measuring the discrepancy between evidence. In this paper, the pignistic probability transform belief χ2 divergence, named as BBχ2 divergence, is proposed. By introducing the pignistic probability transform, the proposed BBχ2 divergence can accurately quantify the difference between evidence with the consideration of multi-element sets. Compared with a few belief divergences, the novel divergence has more precision. Based on this advantageous divergence, a new multi-source information fusion method is devised. The proposed method considers both credibility weights and information volume weights to determine the overall weight of each evidence. Eventually, the proposed method is applied in target recognition and fault diagnosis, in which comparative analysis indicates that the proposed method can realize the highest accuracy for managing evidence conflict.

Providing students with useful feedback on faulty programs can effectively help students fix programs. Spectrum-Based Fault Location (SBFL), which is a widely studied and lightweight technique, can automatically generate a suspicious value of statement ranking to help users find potential faults in a program. However, the performance of SBFL on student programs is not satisfactory, to improve the accuracy of SBFL in student programs, we propose a novel Multi-Correct Programs based Fault Localization (MCPFL) approach. Specifically, We first collected the correct programs submitted by students on the OJ system according to the programming problem numbers and removed the highly similar correct programs based on code similarity, and then stored them together with the faulty program to be located to construct a set of programs. Afterward, we analyzed the suspiciousness of the term in the faulty program through the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). Finally, we designed a formula to calculate the weight of suspiciousness for program statements based on the number of input variables in the statement and weighted it to the spectrum-based fault localization formula. To evaluate the effectiveness of MCPFL, we conducted empirical studies on six student program datasets collected in our OJ system, and the results showed that MCPFL can effectively improve the traditional SBFL methods. In particular, on the EXAM metric, our approach improves by an average of 27.51% on the Dstar formula.

Approximate computing (AC) saves energy and improves performance by introducing approximation into computation in error-torrent applications. This work focuses on an AC strategy that accurately performs important computations and approximates others. In order to make AC circuits practical, we need to determine which computation is how important carefully, and thus need to appropriately approximate the redundant computation for maintaining the required computational quality. In this paper, we focus on the importance of computations at the flip-flop (FF) level and propose a novel importance evaluation methodology. The key idea of the proposed methodology is a two-step fault injection algorithm to extract the near-optimal set of redundant FFs in the circuit. In the first step, the proposed methodology performs the FI simulation for each FF and extracts the candidates of redundant FFs. Then, in the second step, the proposed methodology extracts the set of redundant FFs in a binary search manner. Thanks to the two-step strategy, the proposed algorithm reduces the complexity of architecture exploration from an exponential order to a linear order without understanding the functionality and behavior of the target application program. Experimental results show that the proposed methodology identifies the candidates of redundant FFs depending on the given constraints. In a case study of an image processing accelerator, the truncation for identified redundant FFs reduces the circuit area by 29.6% and saves power dissipation by 44.8% under the ASIC implementation while satisfying the PSNR constraint. Similarly, the dynamic power dissipation is saved by 47.2% under the FPGA implementation.

Adversarial examples (AEs), which cause misclassification by adding subtle perturbations to input images, have been proposed as an attack method on image-classification systems using deep neural networks (DNNs). Physical AEs created by attaching stickers to traffic signs have been reported, which are a threat to traffic-sign-recognition DNNs used in advanced driver assistance systems. We previously proposed an attack method for generating a noise area on images by superimposing an electrical signal on the mobile industry processor interface and showed that it can generate a single adversarial mark that triggers a backdoor attack on the input image. Therefore, we propose a misclassification attack method n DNNs by creating AEs that include small perturbations to multiple places on the image by the fault injection. The perturbation position for AEs is pre-calculated in advance against the target traffic-sign image, which will be captured on future driving. With 5.2% to 5.5% of a specific image on the simulation, the perturbation that induces misclassification to the target label was calculated. As the experimental results, we confirmed that the traffic-sign-recognition DNN on a Raspberry Pi was successfully misclassified when the target traffic sign was captured with. In addition, we created robust AEs that cause misclassification of images with varying positions and size by adding a common perturbation. We propose a method to reduce the amount of robust AEs perturbation. Our results demonstrated successful misclassification of the captured image with a high attack success rate even if the position and size of the captured image are slightly changed.

A major approach to enhancing software quality is reviewing the source code to identify defects. To aid in identifying flaws, an approach in which a machine learning model predicts residual defects after implementing a code review is adopted. After the model has predicted the existence of residual defects, a second-round review is performed to identify such residual flaws. To enhance the prediction accuracy of the model, information known to developers but not recorded as data is utilized. Confidence in the review is evaluated by reviewers using a 10-point scale. The assessment result is used as an independent variable of the prediction model of residual defects. Experimental results indicate that confidence improves the prediction accuracy.

With the growing complexity and scale of software, detecting and repairing errant behaviors at an early stage are critical to reduce the cost of software development. In the practice of fault localization, a typical process usually includes three steps: execution of input domain test cases, construction of model domain test vectors and suspiciousness evaluation. The effectiveness of model domain test vectors is significant for locating the faulty code. However, test vectors with failing labels usually account for a small portion, which inevitably degrades the effectiveness of fault localization. In this paper, we propose a data augmentation method PVaug by using fault propagation context and variational autoencoder (VAE). Our empirical results on 14 programs illustrate that PVaug has promoted the effectiveness of fault localization.

This paper proposes a fault-resilient ROS platform supporting rapid fault detection and recovery. The platform employs heartbeat-based fault detection and node replication-based recovery. Our prototype implementation on top of the ROS Melodic shows a great performance in evaluations with a Nvidia development board and an inverted pendulum device.

A fault-tolerant aggregate signature (FT-AS) scheme is a variant of an aggregate signature scheme with the additional functionality to trace signers that create invalid signatures in case an aggregate signature is invalid. Several FT-AS schemes have been proposed so far, and some of them trace such rogue signers in multi-rounds, i.e., the setting where the signers repeatedly send their individual signatures. However, it has been overlooked that there exists a potential attack on the efficiency of bandwidth consumption in a multi-round FT-AS scheme. Since one of the merits of aggregate signature schemes is the efficiency of bandwidth consumption, such an attack might be critical for multi-round FT-AS schemes. In this paper, we propose a new multi-round FT-AS scheme that is tolerant of such an attack. We implement our scheme and experimentally show that it is more efficient than the existing multi-round FT-AS scheme if rogue signers randomly create invalid signatures with low probability, which for example captures spontaneous failures of devices in IoT systems.

It is very important to design an embedded real-time system as a fault-tolerant system to ensure dependability. In particular, when a power failure occurs, restart processing after power restoration is required in a real-time system using a conventional processor. Even if power is restored quickly, the restart process takes a long time and causes deadline misses. In order to design a fault-tolerant real-time system, it is necessary to have a processor that can resume operation in a short time immediately after power is restored, even if a power failure occurs at any time. Since current embedded real-time systems are required to execute many tasks, high schedulability for high throughput is also important. This paper proposes a non-stop microprocessor architecture to achieve a fault-tolerant real-time system. The non-stop microprocessor is designed so as to resume normal operation even if a power failure occurs at any time, to achieve little performance degradation for high schedulability even if checkpoint creations and restorations are performed many times, to control flexibly non-volatile devices through software configuration, and to ensure data consistency no matter when a checkpoint restoration is performed. The evaluation shows that the non-stop microprocessor can restore a checkpoint within 5µsec and almost hide the overhead of checkpoint creations. The non-stop microprocessor with such capabilities will be an essential component of a fault-tolerant real-time system with high schedulability.

The reliability of deep neural networks (DNN) against hardware errors is essential as DNNs are increasingly employed in safety-critical applications such as automatic driving. Transient errors in memory, such as radiation-induced soft error, may propagate through the inference computation, resulting in unexpected output, which can adversely trigger catastrophic system failures. As a first step to tackle this problem, this paper proposes constructing a vulnerability model (VM) with a small number of fault injections to identify vulnerable model parameters in DNN. We reduce the number of bit locations for fault injection significantly and develop a flow to incrementally collect the training data, i.e., the fault injection results, for VM accuracy improvement. We enumerate key features (KF) that characterize the vulnerability of the parameters and use KF and the collected training data to construct VM. Experimental results show that VM can estimate vulnerabilities of all DNN model parameters only with 1/3490 computations compared with traditional fault injection-based vulnerability estimation.

Aggregate signature schemes enable us to aggregate multiple signatures into a single short signature. One of its typical applications is sensor networks, where a large number of users and devices measure their environments, create signatures to ensure the integrity of the measurements, and transmit their signed data. However, if an invalid signature is mixed into aggregation, the aggregate signature becomes invalid, thus if an aggregate signature is invalid, it is necessary to identify the invalid signature. Furthermore, we need to deal with a situation where an invalid sensor generates invalid signatures probabilistically. In this paper, we introduce a model of aggregate signature schemes with interactive tracing functionality that captures such a situation, and define its functional and security requirements and propose aggregate signature schemes that can identify all rogue sensors. More concretely, based on the idea of Dynamic Traitor Tracing, we can trace rogue sensors dynamically and incrementally, and eventually identify all rogue sensors of generating invalid signatures even if the rogue sensors adaptively collude. In addition, the efficiency of our proposed method is also sufficiently practical.

Fault localization analyzes the runtime information of two classes of test cases (i.e., passing test cases and failing test cases) to identify suspicious statements potentially responsible for a failure. However, the failing test cases are always far fewer than passing test cases in reality, and the class imbalance problem will affect fault localization effectiveness. To address this issue, we propose a data augmentation approach using conditional variational auto-encoder to synthesize new failing test cases for FL. The experimental results show that our approach significantly improves six state-of-the-art fault localization techniques.

Loan default prediction has been a significant problem in the financial domain because overdue loans may incur significant losses. Machine learning methods have been introduced to solve this problem, but there are still many challenges including feature multicollinearity, imbalanced labels, and small data sample problems. To replicate the success of deep learning in many areas, an effective regularization technique named muddling label regularization is introduced in this letter, and an ensemble of feed-forward neural networks is proposed, which outperforms machine learning and deep learning baselines in a real-world dataset.

Combinatorial testing is an effective testing technique for detecting faults in a software or hardware system with multiple factors using combinatorial methods. By performing a test, which is an assignment of possible values to all the factors, and verifying whether the system functions as expected (pass) or not (fail), the presence of faults can be detected. The failures of the tests are possibly caused by combinations of multiple factors assigned with specific values, called faulty interactions. Martínez et al. [1] proposed the first deterministic adaptive algorithm for discovering faulty interactions involving at most two factors where each factor has two values, for which graph representations are adopted. In this paper, we improve Martínez et al.'s algorithm by an adaptive algorithmic approach for discovering faulty interactions in the so-called “non-2-locatable” graphs. We show that, for any system where each “non-2-locatable factor-component” involves two faulty interactions (for example, a system having at most two faulty interactions), our improved algorithm efficiently discovers all the faulty interactions with an extremely low mistaken probability caused by the random selection process in Martínez et al.'s algorithm. The effectiveness of our improved algorithm are revealed by both theoretical discussions and experimental evaluations.

Parallel processing is a typical approach to answer analytical queries on large database. As the size of the database increases, we often try to increase the parallelism by incorporating more processing nodes. However, this approach increases the possibility of node failure as well. According to the conventional practice, if a failure occurs during query processing, the database system restarts the query processing from the beginning. Such temporal cost may be unacceptable to the user. This paper proposes a fault-tolerant query processing mechanism, named PhoeniQ, for analytical parallel database systems. PhoeniQ continuously takes a checkpoint for every operator pipeline and replicates the output of each stateful operator among different processing nodes. If a single processing node fails during query processing, another can promptly take over the processing. Hence, PhoneniQ allows the database system to efficiently resume query processing after a partial failure event. This paper presents a key design of PhoeniQ and prototype-based experiments to demonstrate that PhoeniQ imposes negligible performance overhead and efficiently continues query processing in the face of node failure.

Deep learning applications have often been processed in the cloud or on servers. Still, for applications that require privacy protection and real-time processing, the execution environment is moved to edge devices. Edge devices that implement a neural network (NN) are physically accessible to an attacker. Therefore, physical attacks are a risk. Fault attacks on these devices are capable of misleading classification results and can lead to serious accidents. Therefore, we focus on the softmax function and evaluate a fault attack using a clock glitch against NN implemented in an 8-bit microcontroller. The clock glitch is used for fault injection, and the injection timing is controlled by monitoring the power waveform. The specific waveform is enrolled in advance, and the glitch timing pulse is generated by the sum of absolute difference (SAD) matching algorithm. Misclassification can be achieved by appropriately injecting glitches triggered by pattern detection. We propose a countermeasure against fault injection attacks that utilizes the randomization of power waveforms. The SAD matching is disabled by random number initialization on the summation register of the softmax function.

We study the gathering problem requiring a team of mobile agents to gather at a single node in arbitrary networks. The team consists of k agents with unique identifiers (IDs), and f of them are weakly Byzantine agents, which behave arbitrarily except falsifying their identifiers. The agents move in synchronous rounds and cannot leave any information on nodes. If the number of nodes n is given to agents, the existing fastest algorithm tolerates any number of weakly Byzantine agents and achieves gathering with simultaneous termination in O(n4·|Λgood|·X(n)) rounds, where |Λgood| is the length of the maximum ID of non-Byzantine agents and X(n) is the number of rounds required to explore any network composed of n nodes. In this paper, we ask the question of whether we can reduce the time complexity if we have a strong team, i.e., a team with a few Byzantine agents, because not so many agents are subject to faults in practice. We give a positive answer to this question by proposing two algorithms in the case where at least 4f2+9f+4 agents exist. Both the algorithms assume that the upper bound N of n is given to agents. The first algorithm achieves gathering with non-simultaneous termination in O((f+|&Lambdagood|)·X(N)) rounds. The second algorithm achieves gathering with simultaneous termination in O((f+|&Lambdaall|)·X(N)) rounds, where |&Lambdaall| is the length of the maximum ID of all agents. The second algorithm significantly reduces the time complexity compared to the existing one if n is given to agents and |&Lambdaall|=O(|&Lambdagood|) holds.

Network virtualization has become a promising paradigm for supporting diverse vertical services in Software Defined Networks (SDNs). Each vertical service is carried by a virtual network (VN), which normally has a chaining structure. In this way, a Service Function Chain (SFC) is composed by an ordered set of virtual network functions (VNFs) to provide tailored network services. Such new programmable flexibilities for future networks also bring new network management challenges: how to collect and analyze network measurement data, and further predict and diagnose the performance of SFCs? This is a fundamental problem for the management of SFCs, because the VNFs could be migrated in case of SFC performance degradation to avoid Service Level Agreement (SLA) violation. Despite the importance of the problem, SFC performance analysis has not attracted much research attention in the literature. In this current paper, enabled by a novel detailed network debugging technology, In-band Network Telemetry (INT), we propose a learning based framework for early SFC fault prediction and diagnosis. Based on the SFC traffic flow measurement data provided by INT, the framework firstly extracts SFC performance features. Then, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are utilized to predict the upcoming values for these features in the next time slot. Finally, Support Vector Machine (SVM) is utilized as network fault classifier to predict possible SFC faults. We also discuss the practical utilization relevance of the proposed framework, and conduct a set of network emulations to validate the performance of the proposed framework.

Active network monitoring based on Boolean network tomography is a promising technique to localize link failures instantly in transport networks. However, the required set of monitoring trails must be recomputed after each link failure has occurred to handle succeeding link failures. Existing heuristic methods cannot compute the required monitoring trails in a sufficiently short time when multiple-link failures must be localized in the whole of large-scale managed networks. This paper proposes an approach for computing the required monitoring trails within an allowable expected period specified beforehand. A random walk-based analysis estimates the number of monitoring trails to be computed in the proposed approach. The estimated number of monitoring trails are computed by a lightweight method that only guarantees partial localization within restricted areas. The lightweight method is repeatedly executed until a successful set of monitoring trails achieving unambiguous localization in the entire managed networks can be obtained. This paper demonstrates that the proposed approach can compute a small number of monitoring trails for localizing all independent dual-link failures in managed networks made up of thousands of links within a given expected short period.