Safety Analysis of C Code through Reverse Engineering background

Software is increasingly making its way into embedded devices in missionand safety-critical domains such as the automotive, avionics or railway industry. Assessing and managing the risk that is inherent in software realizing safety-critical control functions is a key requirement in engineering hybrid systems. This case study reports on a solution carried out to perform fault analysis and criticality analysis of existing source code (C code) for ECU’s in cars. Since software is extremely sensitive to errors and testing can never be exhaustive to detect and eliminate every harmful behavior of code, the motivation is to find failure causes by applying the quantitative risk method FTA on component configuration level. For this purpose, the manual written C code is reversely transformed into a data-flow model used for further safety analysis.