On intermittence bugs in the battery-less internet of things (WIP paper)

The resource-constrained devices of the battery-less Internet of Things are powered off energy harvesting and compute intermittently, as energy is available. Forward progress of programs is ensured by creating persistent state. Mixed-volatile platforms are thus an asset, as they map slices of the address space onto non-volatile memory. However, these platforms also possibly introduce intermittence bugs, where intermittent and continuous executions differ. Our ongoing work on intermittence bugs includes [label=()] an analysis that demonstrates their presence in settings that current literature overlooks; the design of efficient testing techniques to check their presence in arbitrary code, which would be otherwise prohibitive given the sheer number of different executions to check; the implementation of an offline tool called ScEpTIC that implements these techniques. ScEpTIC finds the same bugs as a brute-force approach, but is six orders of magnitude faster.