Information Flow Paths from RTL Traces

Abstract: Security validation is an important yet challenging part of the hardware design process, yet, by convention, validation engineers are tasked with defining the threat model, specifying the relevant security properties, detecting any violations of those properties, and assessing the consequences to system security, each of which is manually intensive and may introduce errors. The combined technologies of information flow tracking and specification mining represent an automated approach to property generation and validation, but prior work on information flow tracking on RTL trace data was limited to find cases under which information flowed between registers, without reproducing full paths to capture how sensitive information propagates through a design. With the introduction of new technologies accelerating hardware analysis, we develop a novel approach for constructing information flow paths from register transfer level (RTL) trace data.