{"ID":5935834,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-07T01:22:02.77346169Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-07T02:10:06.972658124Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03135","arxiv_id":"2607.03135","title":"Detecting Architectural Drift in Safety-Critical Firmware through Runtime Trace Analysis","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.","short_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, abstra...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03135","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.03135v1","authors":"[\"Domenico Francesco De Angelis\",\"Marco De Luca\",\"Domenico Amalfitano\",\"Pasquale Cimmino\",\"Anna Rita Fasolino\"]","published":"2026-07-03T09:25:30Z","proceeding":"cs.SE","tasks":"[\"cs.SE\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\"]","has_code":false}