Fault tolerance masking

They are known as intrusion tolerant systems when protection mainly concerns with faults coming from intrusions. Fault-tolerant techniques can be subdivided [1] in several groups fault detection, fault recovery, fault handling and fault masking. In this work, we focus on proactive and reactive fault-tolerant recovery techniques. 

Fault tolerance As defined earlier, fault tolerant designs are aimed at development of systems that could function correctly in the presence of faults. This is primarily achieved by some kind of redundancy to detect or mask a fault. Masking/detections are followed by fault location, containment, and recovery. 

Software fault tolerance For software, fault tolerant design redundancies are required to mask residual design faults. Some of the issues related to this shall include but are not limited to ... 

From Fig. 7, we find that the performance of enhanced programs are decreased in varying degrees because of the inserted masking instructions. The average performance overhead of M-FULL, M-CVR and MASER versions are 21.8%, 14.3% and 3.3% respectively. Due to the relatively limit number of inserted masks and the fast speed of masking operations, the additional overhead is fewer than other traditional fault tolerance techniques against soft errors. 

---