QIF-Verilog: Quantitative Information-Flow based Hardware Description Languages for Pre-Silicon Security Assessment

TLDR

Hardware vulnerabilities often arise from design mistakes, and while language‑based verification is promising, it suffers from scalability issues and hardware overhead. This paper proposes QIF‑Verilog, a language‑based framework for evaluating the trustworthiness of hardware systems at the register‑transfer level. QIF‑Verilog extends Verilog’s type system with a quantified information‑flow model, compiles designs to analyze data flow, and applies the model to benchmarks from Trust‑Hub and OpenCore. The framework automatically detects Trojans or design faults that leak information from circuit outputs and accurately assesses design security.

Abstract

Hardware vulnerabilities are often due to design mistakes because the designer does not sufficiently consider potential security vulnerabilities at the design stage. As a result, various security solutions have been developed to protect ICs, among which the language-based hardware security verification serves as a promising solution. The verification process will be performed while compiling the HDL of the design. However, similar to other formal verification methods, the language-based approach also suffers from scalability issue. Furthermore, existing solutions either lead to hardware overhead or are not designed for vulnerable or malicious logic detection. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a new language based framework, QIF-Verilog, to evaluate the trustworthiness of a hardware system at register transfer level (RTL). This framework introduces a quantified information flow (QIF) model and extends Verilog type systems to provide more expressiveness in presenting security rules; QIF is capable of checking the security rules given by the hardware designer. Secrets are labeled by the new type and then parsed to data flow, to which a QIF model will be applied. To demonstrate our approach, we design a compiler for QIF-Verilog and perform vulnerability analysis on benchmarks from Trust-Hub and OpenCore. We show that Trojans or design faults that leak information from circuit outputs can be detected automatically, and that our method evaluates the security of the design correctly.