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An embedded system is a dedicated computer system in which hardware and software are combined to perform some specific tasks. Recent advancements in the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology make it possible to implement the complete embedded system on a single FPGA chip. The fundamental component of an embedded system is a microprocessor...
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... of various embedded systems. Embedded systems are involved in medical applications, automotive, home appliances, industrial control system and many more. A general embedded system consists of a microprocessor for processing, memory for storage, output and input devices for displaying output and take inputs from the outside world respectively [1]. Fig. 1 shows the simple and general block diagram of an embedded system. A processor is the heart of an embedded system and processors are classified into two categories hard-core and soft-core processors. The complexity of integrated component inside the embedded system increased drastically, and it is not possible to design a microprocessor ...
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The design of Microprocessors Computer Architectures remains as a fundamental course in Computer Science and Computer Engineering. The technology and organization inside microprocessors have changed quite fast in the last twenty years. That change has increased the information handled in class, difficulting the teaching/learning process among stude...
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The increasing complexity of modern processors poses many challenges to existing hardware verification tools and methodologies for detecting security-critical bugs. Recent attacks on processors have shown the fatal consequences of uncovering and exploiting hardware vulnerabilities. Fuzzing has emerged as a promising technique for detecting software vulnerabilities. Recently, a few hardware fuzzing techniques have been proposed. However, they suffer from several limitations, including non-applicability to commonly used Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) like Verilog and VHDL, the need for significant human intervention, and inability to capture many intrinsic hardware behaviors, such as signal transitions and floating wires. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a novel hardware fuzzer, TheHuzz, that overcomes the aforementioned limitations and significantly improves the state of the art. We analyze the intrinsic behaviors of hardware designs in HDLs and then measure the coverage metrics that model such behaviors. TheHuzz generates assembly-level instructions to increase the desired coverage values, thereby finding many hardware bugs that are exploitable from software. We evaluate TheHuzz on four popular open-source processors and achieve 1.98x and 3.33x the speed compared to the industry-standard random regression approach and the state-of-the-art hardware fuzzer, DiffuzRTL, respectively. Using TheHuzz, we detected 11 bugs in these processors, including 8 new vulnerabilities, and we demonstrate exploits using the detected bugs. We also show that TheHuzz overcomes the limitations of formal verification tools from the semiconductor industry by comparing its findings to those discovered by the Cadence JasperGold tool.
