TheHuzz: Instruction Fuzzing of Processors Using Golden-Reference Models for Finding Software-Exploitable Vulnerabilities
PaperA 2022 USENIX Security paper by Rahul Kande and coauthors presenting TheHuzz, a hardware fuzzer for processors. The paper argues that prior hardware fuzzing approaches have important limitations, and proposes assembly-level instruction fuzzing guided by coverage metrics derived from intrinsic HDL behaviors. In the reported evaluation on four open-source processors, TheHuzz achieved higher speed than random regression and DifuzzRTL, found 11 bugs including 8 new ones, demonstrated exploits, and was compared against Cadence JasperGold.
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Overview
TheHuzz: Instruction Fuzzing of Processors Using Golden-Reference Models for Finding Software-Exploitable Vulnerabilities is a paper by Rahul Kande, Addison Crump, Garrett Persyn, Patrick Jauernig, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Aakash Tyagi, and Jeyavijayan Rajendran. It appeared in the 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2022).
What the paper presents
The paper presents TheHuzz, described as a novel hardware fuzzer intended to detect software-exploitable processor bugs. The work is framed around limitations in prior hardware fuzzing approaches, including limited applicability to common HDLs such as Verilog and VHDL, substantial human intervention, and difficulty capturing intrinsic hardware behaviors such as signal transitions and floating wires.
According to the abstract, TheHuzz analyzes intrinsic behaviors of hardware designs in HDLs and measures coverage metrics that model those behaviors. It then generates assembly-level instructions to increase the desired coverage values, with the goal of finding hardware bugs that are exploitable from software. The paper title explicitly states that this instruction fuzzing is done using golden-reference models.
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