Overview

Anoop Nataraja is listed as an author of ProcessorFuzz: Processor Fuzzing with Control and Status Registers Guidance. In the paper’s author block, Nataraja is associated with the Department of ECE, University of Washington and the email address mysanoop@uw.edu.

Associated work

ProcessorFuzz

The paper presents ProcessorFuzz, a processor fuzzer for Register-Transfer Level (RTL) verification. Its key technique is a CSR-transition coverage metric: ProcessorFuzz monitors transitions in Control and Status Registers (CSRs), which the paper describes as controlling and holding processor state. The authors argue that CSR transitions indicate new processor states and can therefore guide fuzzing toward broader state exploration.

The paper evaluates ProcessorFuzz on three open-source RISC-V processors: Rocket, BOOM, and BlackParrot. In the reported results, ProcessorFuzz triggered ground-truth bugs 1.23× faster on average than DIFUZZRTL, exposed 8 new bugs across the three RISC-V cores, and found one new bug in a reference model; the paper states that all nine bugs were confirmed by the corresponding project developers.