Hardware-Based Mutation Strategy

Overview

Hardware-Based Mutation Strategy is a technique described in Instiller: Towards Efficient and Realistic RTL Fuzzing as part of an RTL fuzzing approach for CPU hardware verification. The paper presents it alongside a hardware-based seed selection strategy as one of the methods used to improve overall fuzzing performance.^[1][2]

Role in Instiller

In the evidence provided, Instiller identifies three main improvements over prior RTL fuzzing approaches:

1. input instruction distillation based on a variant of ant colony optimization,
2. more realistic handling of interruptions and exceptions, and
3. hardware-based seed selection and mutation strategies.^[1][2]

Within this design, the hardware-based mutation strategy is framed as an RTL-specific mutation approach that uses hardware-related heuristics and mutation operations.^[2]

What the evidence supports

The available source supports the following points about this technique:

• it is proposed as part of Instiller,^[1][2]
• it is intended to improve fuzzing performance in RTL fuzzing,^[1][2]
• it relies on hardware-related heuristics and mutation operations rather than generic mutation alone.^[2]

Evidence limitations

The provided evidence does not include a detailed algorithmic description of the mutation operations, selection logic, or implementation specifics for the mutation strategy alone. As a result, this article is limited to the high-level characterization stated in the source.^[2]

Implementations

• [[Instiller]] implements this technique.^[1][2]

^[1]: Source evidence from the paper abstract and introduction. ^[2]: Source evidence from the paper's stated contributions.