(Security) Assertions by Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kande, Rahul, Pearce, Hammond, Tan, Benjamin, Dolan-Gavitt, Brendan, Thakur, Shailja, Karri, Ramesh, Rajendran, Jeyavijayan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Kande, Rahul
Pearce, Hammond
Tan, Benjamin
Dolan-Gavitt, Brendan
Thakur, Shailja
Karri, Ramesh
Rajendran, Jeyavijayan
author_facet Kande, Rahul
Pearce, Hammond
Tan, Benjamin
Dolan-Gavitt, Brendan
Thakur, Shailja
Karri, Ramesh
Rajendran, Jeyavijayan
contents The security of computer systems typically relies on a hardware root of trust. As vulnerabilities in hardware can have severe implications on a system, there is a need for techniques to support security verification activities. Assertion-based verification is a popular verification technique that involves capturing design intent in a set of assertions that can be used in formal verification or testing-based checking. However, writing security-centric assertions is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the use of emerging large language models (LLMs) for code generation in hardware assertion generation for security, where primarily natural language prompts, such as those one would see as code comments in assertion files, are used to produce SystemVerilog assertions. We focus our attention on a popular LLM and characterize its ability to write assertions out of the box, given varying levels of detail in the prompt. We design an evaluation framework that generates a variety of prompts, and we create a benchmark suite comprising real-world hardware designs and corresponding golden reference assertions that we want to generate with the LLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_14027
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle (Security) Assertions by Large Language Models
Kande, Rahul
Pearce, Hammond
Tan, Benjamin
Dolan-Gavitt, Brendan
Thakur, Shailja
Karri, Ramesh
Rajendran, Jeyavijayan
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
The security of computer systems typically relies on a hardware root of trust. As vulnerabilities in hardware can have severe implications on a system, there is a need for techniques to support security verification activities. Assertion-based verification is a popular verification technique that involves capturing design intent in a set of assertions that can be used in formal verification or testing-based checking. However, writing security-centric assertions is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the use of emerging large language models (LLMs) for code generation in hardware assertion generation for security, where primarily natural language prompts, such as those one would see as code comments in assertion files, are used to produce SystemVerilog assertions. We focus our attention on a popular LLM and characterize its ability to write assertions out of the box, given varying levels of detail in the prompt. We design an evaluation framework that generates a variety of prompts, and we create a benchmark suite comprising real-world hardware designs and corresponding golden reference assertions that we want to generate with the LLM.
title (Security) Assertions by Large Language Models
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.14027