Experimental Analysis of FreeRTOS Dependability through Targeted Fault Injection Campaigns

2026-03-26

AI Summary

This work addresses the vulnerability of the real-time operating system FreeRTOS to ionizing radiation-induced faults in safety-critical applications, which poses a significant threat to system reliability. The authors propose KRONOS, a non-intrusive software-based fault injection framework that requires neither specialized hardware nor debugging interfaces, enabling the first systematic assessment of the susceptibility of FreeRTOS kernel data structures—such as scheduler variables and Task Control Blocks (TCBs)—to both transient and permanent faults. Through large-scale, targeted fault injection experiments, the study reveals that corruption of pointers and critical scheduler variables frequently leads to system crashes, whereas damage to most TCB fields has limited impact on system availability. These findings provide crucial insights for designing more resilient and reliable real-time operating systems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSes) play a crucial role in safety-critical domains, where deterministic and predictable task execution is essential. Yet they are increasingly exposed to ionizing radiation, which can compromise system dependability. To assess FreeRTOS under such conditions, we introduce KRONOS, a software-based, non-intrusive post-propagation Fault Injection (FI) framework that injects transient and permanent faults into Operating System-visible kernel data structures without specialized hardware or debug interfaces. Using KRONOS, we conduct an extensive FI campaign on core FreeRTOS kernel components, including scheduler-related variables and Task Control Blocks (TCBs), characterizing the impact of kernel-level corruptions on functional correctness, timing behavior, and availability. The results show that corruption of pointer and key scheduler-related variables frequently leads to crashes, whereas many TCB fields have only a limited impact on system availability.

Problem

• Real-Time Operating Systems
• dependability
• fault injection
• FreeRTOS
• ionizing radiation

Innovation

• Fault Injection
• FreeRTOS
• Real-Time Operating System
• Dependability
• Kernel Data Structures