Accelerating SoC Security Verification and Vulnerability Detection Through Symbolic Execution

Abstract

Model checking is one of the most commonly used technique in formal verification. However, the exponential scale state space renders exhaustive state enumeration inefficient even for a moderate System on Chip (SoC) design. In this paper, we propose a method that leverages symbolic execution to accelerate state space search and pinpoint security vulnerabilities. We automatically convert the hardware design to functionally equivalent C++ code and utilize the KLEE symbolic execution engine to perform state exploration through heuristic search. To reduce the search space, we symbolically represent essential input signals while making non-critical inputs concrete. Experiment results have demonstrated that our method can precisely identify security vulnerabilities at significantly lower computation cost.