Detecting Architectural Drift in Safety-Critical Firmware through Runtime Trace Analysis
Maintaining consistency between architectural design and runtime-observed behavior is challenging in long-lived safety-critical firmware. This paper presents a runtime-informed methodology for detecting architectural drift in ISO 26262-compliant firmware. The approach collects hardware-assisted execution traces, abstracts them into message exchanges among firmware components, and compares the resulting runtime behavior with design-time sequence diagrams through a deterministic differencing step. The computed delta identifies discrepancies as confirmed, missing, additional, or inverted, while a constrained LLM-based step generates a human-readable report only to support expert review. We e...
| Authors | Domenico Francesco De Angelis, Marco De Luca, Domenico Amalfitano et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 3 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 July 2026 |
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