In this article, we describe a prototype cosimulation framework using Xyce, GHDL and CocoTB that can be used to analyze digital hardware designs in out-of-nominal environments. We demonstrate current software methods and inspire future work via analysis of an open-source encryption core design. Note that this article is meant as a proof-of-concept to motivate integration of general cosimulation techniques with Xyce, an open-source circuit simulator. ------------------------------------------------
Verifying that hardware design implementations adhere to specifications is a time intensive and sometimes intractable problem due to the massive size of the system's state space. Formal methods techniques can be used to prove certain tractable specification properties; however, they are expensive, and often require subject matter experts to develop and solve. Nonetheless, hardware verification is a critical process to ensure security and safety properties are met, and encapsulates problems associated with trust and reliability. For complex designs where coverage of the entire state space is unattainable, prioritizing regions most vulnerable to security or reliability threats would allow efficient allocation of valuable verification resources. Stackelberg security games model interactions between a defender, whose goal is to assign resources to protect a set of targets, and an attacker, who aims to inflict maximum damage on the targets after first observing the defender's strategy. In equilibrium, the defender has an optimal security deployment strategy, given the attacker's best response. We apply this Stackelberg security framework to synthesized hardware implementations using the design's network structure and logic to inform defender valuations and verification costs. The defender's strategy in equilibrium is thus interpreted as a prioritization of the allocation of verification resources in the presence of an adversary. We demonstrate this technique on several open-source synthesized hardware designs.
We present a characterization of short-term stability of Kauffman's NK (random) Boolean networks under arbitrary distributions of transfer functions. Given such a Boolean network where each transfer function is drawn from the same distribution, we present a formula that determines whether short-term chaos (damage spreading) will happen. Our main technical tool which enables the formal proof of this formula is the Fourier analysis of Boolean functions, which describes such functions as multilinear polynomials over the inputs. Numerical simulations on mixtures of threshold functions and nested canalyzing functions demonstrate the formula's correctness.