VACO
TechniqueVACO is a variant of ant colony optimization used by INSTILLER, an RTL fuzzer, to distill CPU RTL input-instruction sequences so they remain shorter and more efficient for fuzzing.
First seen 5/26/2026
Last seen 5/26/2026
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Overview
VACO is described in the INSTILLER paper as a variant of ant colony optimization (ACO) used for RTL fuzzing. INSTILLER, short for Instruction Distiller, applies VACO to distill input instructions so that fuzzing inputs stay short and efficient. The motivation is that prior CPU RTL fuzzing approaches can produce instruction inputs whose length keeps growing, while longer inputs are described as ineffective for fuzzing. [C1]
Role in INSTILLER
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2 connectionsINSTILLER uses VACO, a variant of ACO, to distill input instructions.
VACO is a variant of ACO (Ant Colony Optimization).
CITATIONS
5 sources5 citations — click to expand
[1] Motivation for VACO: prior CPU RTL fuzzing can produce growing instruction-input lengths, and longer inputs are described as ineffective for fuzzing. INSTILLER: Towards Efficient and Realistic RTL Fuzzing
[2] VACO is a variant of ant colony optimization used by INSTILLER to distill input instructions and keep them short and efficient for fuzzing. INSTILLER: Towards Efficient and Realistic RTL Fuzzing
[3] INSTILLER also inserts interruptions and exceptions when generating inputs and uses hardware-based seed selection and mutation strategies. INSTILLER: Towards Efficient and Realistic RTL Fuzzing
[4] In experiments on real-world target CPU cores, INSTILLER reports 29.4% more coverage than DiFuzzRTL and 17.0% more detected mismatches. INSTILLER: Towards Efficient and Realistic RTL Fuzzing
[5] With VACO, INSTILLER reports 79.3% shorter input instructions than DiFuzzRTL and a 6.7% average execution-speed increase from distillation. INSTILLER: Towards Efficient and Realistic RTL Fuzzing