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Pre-silicon fuzzing

Concept

**Pre-silicon fuzzing** is the application of fuzz-testing techniques to hardware designs before fabrication, with the goal of exposing design bugs or security weaknesses while the processor or hardware block is still available as a model, simulator, or register-transfer-level design. In processor-security research, recent work extends pre-silicon fuzzing beyond functional-correctness testing toward **security-oriented fuzzing**, including detection of side-channel leakage against formal hardware-software leakage contracts.[^geier-abstract]

First seen 5/24/2026
Last seen 9/10/2026
Evidence 4 chunks
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WIKI

Pre-silicon fuzzing

Pre-silicon fuzzing is the application of fuzz-testing techniques to hardware designs before fabrication, with the goal of exposing design bugs or security weaknesses while the processor or hardware block is still available as a model, simulator, or register-transfer-level design. In processor-security research, recent work extends pre-silicon fuzzing beyond functional-correctness testing toward security-oriented fuzzing, including detection of side-channel leakage against formal hardware-software leakage contracts.[1]

Motivation

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RELATIONSHIPS

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The paper is about pre-silicon fuzzing of open-source processors.
SpecDoctor ← implements 95% 1e
SpecDoctor is described as the state-of-the-art hardware pre-silicon fuzzer.
Specure ← implements 90% 1e
Specure is a pre-silicon fuzzer for detecting speculative execution vulnerabilities.