Detecting Architectural Drift in Safety-Critical Firmware through Runtime Trace Analysis

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03135v1
• Date: Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:25:30 GMT
• Title: Detecting Architectural Drift in Safety-Critical Firmware through Runtime Trace Analysis
• Abstract summary: This paper presents a runtime-informed methodology for detecting architectural drift in ISO 26262-compliant firmware.<n>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.<n>We evaluate the methodology in an industrial firmware context through agreement-based validation and a practitioner survey.
• Score: 3.2187337255863397
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: 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 evaluate the methodology in an industrial firmware context through agreement-based validation and a practitioner survey. Results over 26 test cases show strong agreement between the generated deltas and expert-curated references, while practitioners perceive the reports as useful for interpreting drift, reducing manual analysis effort, and supporting safety-oriented documentation activities. The findings suggest that combining runtime trace analysis, deterministic architectural differencing, and constrained LLM-based reporting can practically support architectural drift detection in evolving safety-critical firmware.

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