Eliminating Microarchitectural Dependency From Architectural Vulnerability

The Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) of a hardware structure is the probability that a fault in the structure will affect the output of a program. AVF captures both microarchitectural and architectural fault masking effects; therefore, AVF measurements cannot generate insight into the vulnerability of software independent of hardware. To evaluate the behavior of software in the presence of hardware faults, the authors must isolate the software-dependent (architecture-level masking) portion of AVF from the hardware-dependent (microarchitecture-level masking) portion, providing a quantitative basis to make reliability decisions about software independent of hardware.