Just Fuzz It: Fuzz Testing in the Hardware Domain

Modern digital circuits are described with the aid of hundreds of thousands of lines of hardware description language (HDL) and millions of different combinations of states. Verification engineers are presented with the Herculean task of exhaustively proving that these designs are functionally correct. In addition, hardware security has recently become an increasingly more critical consideration in hardware design. Verification engineers must now not only prove the functionality of a design but also its security from malevolent actors. Current verification tools and methodologies used by these engineers have proven to be unable to guarantee the soundness of a design. This is shown in the uncovering of hardware security flaws, such as Spectre and Meltdown, which undermine the security of critical systems. We propose a new hardware verification technique, based on an existing software technique called fuzz testing, which can be used in conjunction with existing tools to detect these bugs before tapeout