Where can even a deep discussion on cutting-edge hardware security research, turn into something genuinely joyful and exciting? Exactly: NDSS in beautiful San Diego. 🌞🔐 Happy to announce several new research contributions in Hardware Security at NDSS 2026 next week in San Diego! 📅 Wednesday, 25 February, 16:00 – 17:20, Session 8B: Program Analysis & Fuzzing – Crash Bandicoot, Coast Ballroom Paper: ReFuzz: Reusing Tests for Processor Fuzzing with Contextual Bandits Authors: Chen Chen, Zaiyan Xu, Mohamadreza Rostami, David Liu, Dileep Kalathil, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Jeyavijayan Rajendran Overview: ReFuzz revolutionizes processor fuzzing by learning from vulnerabilities discovered in prior processor generations. Using contextual bandits, it selects and mutates highly effective tests from historic designs, dramatically improving vulnerability detection and coverage efficiency on new target processors. 📅 Thursday, 26 February, 09:20 – 10:40, Session 9A: Fuzzing – Shake the Silicon, Pacific Ballroom A-C Paper: Fuzzilicon: A Post-Silicon Microcode-Guided x86 CPU Fuzzer Authors: Johannes Lenzen, Mohamadreza Rostami, Lichao Wu, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi Overview: Fuzzilicon is the first framework to perform post-silicon fuzzing on x86 CPUs with deep microcode-level instrumentation. By extracting feedback directly from the processor’s internal microcode execution and combining it with coverage-guided fuzzing, this work uncovers subtle microarchitectural vulnerabilities that are invisible to traditional black-box fuzzing. 📅Thursday, 26 Feb • 09:20 – 10:40 • Pacific Ballroom A-C Paper: GoldenFuzz: Generative Golden Reference Hardware Fuzzing Authors: Lichao Wu, Mohamadreza Rostami, Huimin Li, Nikhilesh Singh, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi Overview: GoldenFuzz introduces a two-stage fuzzing strategy that decouples test refinement from vulnerability exploration using a fast golden-reference model of the device. This enables efficient and semantically aware hardware fuzzing that achieves high coverage and discovers new high-severity vulnerabilities across RISC-V processors. Looking forward to sharing these works with the community! #NDSS2026 #HardwareSecurity #Fuzzing #ProcessorSecurity #Cybersecurity #SanDiego #Sun