Beyond Random Inputs: A Novel ML-Based Hardware Fuzzing

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Hauptverfasser: Rostami, Mohamadreza, Chilese, Marco, Zeitouni, Shaza, Kande, Rahul, Rajendran, Jeyavijayan, Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Rostami, Mohamadreza
Chilese, Marco
Zeitouni, Shaza
Kande, Rahul
Rajendran, Jeyavijayan
Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza
author_facet Rostami, Mohamadreza
Chilese, Marco
Zeitouni, Shaza
Kande, Rahul
Rajendran, Jeyavijayan
Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza
contents Modern computing systems heavily rely on hardware as the root of trust. However, their increasing complexity has given rise to security-critical vulnerabilities that cross-layer at-tacks can exploit. Traditional hardware vulnerability detection methods, such as random regression and formal verification, have limitations. Random regression, while scalable, is slow in exploring hardware, and formal verification techniques are often concerned with manual effort and state explosions. Hardware fuzzing has emerged as an effective approach to exploring and detecting security vulnerabilities in large-scale designs like modern processors. They outperform traditional methods regarding coverage, scalability, and efficiency. However, state-of-the-art fuzzers struggle to achieve comprehensive coverage of intricate hardware designs within a practical timeframe, often falling short of a 70% coverage threshold. We propose a novel ML-based hardware fuzzer, ChatFuzz, to address this challenge. Ourapproach leverages LLMs like ChatGPT to understand processor language, focusing on machine codes and generating assembly code sequences. RL is integrated to guide the input generation process by rewarding the inputs using code coverage metrics. We use the open-source RISCV-based RocketCore processor as our testbed. ChatFuzz achieves condition coverage rate of 75% in just 52 minutes compared to a state-of-the-art fuzzer, which requires a lengthy 30-hour window to reach a similar condition coverage. Furthermore, our fuzzer can attain 80% coverage when provided with a limited pool of 10 simulation instances/licenses within a 130-hour window. During this time, it conducted a total of 199K test cases, of which 6K produced discrepancies with the processor's golden model. Our analysis identified more than 10 unique mismatches, including two new bugs in the RocketCore and discrepancies from the RISC-V ISA Simulator.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_06856
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Random Inputs: A Novel ML-Based Hardware Fuzzing
Rostami, Mohamadreza
Chilese, Marco
Zeitouni, Shaza
Kande, Rahul
Rajendran, Jeyavijayan
Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza
Software Engineering
Hardware Architecture
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Modern computing systems heavily rely on hardware as the root of trust. However, their increasing complexity has given rise to security-critical vulnerabilities that cross-layer at-tacks can exploit. Traditional hardware vulnerability detection methods, such as random regression and formal verification, have limitations. Random regression, while scalable, is slow in exploring hardware, and formal verification techniques are often concerned with manual effort and state explosions. Hardware fuzzing has emerged as an effective approach to exploring and detecting security vulnerabilities in large-scale designs like modern processors. They outperform traditional methods regarding coverage, scalability, and efficiency. However, state-of-the-art fuzzers struggle to achieve comprehensive coverage of intricate hardware designs within a practical timeframe, often falling short of a 70% coverage threshold. We propose a novel ML-based hardware fuzzer, ChatFuzz, to address this challenge. Ourapproach leverages LLMs like ChatGPT to understand processor language, focusing on machine codes and generating assembly code sequences. RL is integrated to guide the input generation process by rewarding the inputs using code coverage metrics. We use the open-source RISCV-based RocketCore processor as our testbed. ChatFuzz achieves condition coverage rate of 75% in just 52 minutes compared to a state-of-the-art fuzzer, which requires a lengthy 30-hour window to reach a similar condition coverage. Furthermore, our fuzzer can attain 80% coverage when provided with a limited pool of 10 simulation instances/licenses within a 130-hour window. During this time, it conducted a total of 199K test cases, of which 6K produced discrepancies with the processor's golden model. Our analysis identified more than 10 unique mismatches, including two new bugs in the RocketCore and discrepancies from the RISC-V ISA Simulator.
title Beyond Random Inputs: A Novel ML-Based Hardware Fuzzing
topic Software Engineering
Hardware Architecture
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06856