Visit of Federico Reghenzani at University of Twente

On September 3rd, 2025, together with Marco Ottavi, lead of the Dependable Computing Systems group, I had the pleasure of hosting Federico Reghenzani, Assistant Professor from the HEAP Lab at Politecnico di Milano. His talk, “When Software Meets Radiation: Compiler-level Hardening and Testing”, offered valuable insights into Software-Implemented Hardware Fault Tolerance (SIHFT) and its experimental evaluation through fault injection campaigns—a topic closely connected to my long-standing research interest since my PhD.

Federico introduced ASPIS, a set of LLVM compiler passes that transparently add SIHFT mechanisms (such as data replication and control-flow graph signatures) while preserving compiler optimizations. He further presented experimental results obtained with laser facilities, radioactive sources, and particle accelerators, showing how ASPIS can drastically reduce silent data corruptions, albeit at the cost of execution overhead.

During the visit, we identified two promising directions for collaboration:

• Hardware generation of signature calculation for control-flow execution
  Extending ASPIS’ control-flow protection by offloading signature computations to dedicated hardware accelerators.
• FPGA-based fault injection for SIHFT evaluation
  Exploiting our FPGA-based injection infrastructure to pinpoint which hardware features remain insufficiently protected by SIHFT, paving the way for a hardware/software co-design approach to reinforce these weak points.

We look forward to pursuing this collaboration and advancing efficient, compiler-assisted, and hardware-supported fault tolerance for real-time and safety-critical systems.