Cybersecurity for Next Generation Semiconductors

System-on-Chip (SoC) designs are at the core of modern electronic systems, powering applications ranging from smartphones and IoT devices to autonomous vehicles and critical infrastructure. As the integration of multiple Intellectual Property (IP) cores within SoCs increases, so does the security risk associated with their complexity. Hardware has formally been assumed to be the root of trust for a computer system, but numerous attacks show that this is no longer the case (e.g., Meltdown/Spectre, GhostWrite). There are numerous security concerns that come into the picture, including information leakage, access control violations, and more. These risks are further exacerbated by the growing reliance on third-party IPs, which introduces trust and verification challenges. These security concerns can arise from simple design deficiencies or intentional motives. As cyber threats continue to evolve rapidly, ensuring the security of SoCs has become a top priority, requiring rigorous security verification throughout the design and development process.

Challenges of Security Verification

Pre-silicon security verification for SoCs is an inherently complex and resource-intensive process. It requires extensive effort to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities before fabrication. However, traditional verification methodologies struggle to keep pace with modern SoC designs, leading to inefficiencies and increased time-to-market pressures. Current security verification approaches include methods such as static analysis, formal verification, and dynamic verification through emulation. The key challenges in security verification include:

• Manual security review, which is highly dependent on extensive, expert knowledge, creating bottlenecks in the verification process.

• Scalability issues, as increasing design complexity makes traditional verification techniques difficult to apply effectively across large SoCs.

• Limited automation, as threat modeling and property development remain largely manual, increasing both the time required and the cost of verification.

Given these limitations, there is a need for a more efficient and scalable approach to enhance SoC security verification while reducing the burden on design and verification engineers.

Application of GenAI

Generative AI (GenAI) has demonstrated significant potential in automating complex tasks, ranging from natural language processing to code synthesis and security analysis. In the SoC development flow, it has applications for generating design code and automating verification tasks. For security verification specifically, it can bring expert-level security capabilities directly to every engineer’s desk. It can enhance security verification through a myriad of mechanisms, including automated design analysis for security asset identification, threat modeling, security testbench generation, and more. Additionally, AI-driven models enhance adaptability by continuously learning from evolving security threats, thereby improving verification effectiveness over time. This becomes increasingly important as GenAI can consequently be used by adversaries to create and launch new attacks. With the advantages of GenAI, pre-silicon SoC security verification can become more efficient, scalable, and better equipped to handle modern cybersecurity challenges.

Caspia Technologies: GenAI Enhanced Secure-by-Design

Caspia Technologies proudly introduces the first GenAI-powered pre-silicon security verification suite, enabling seamless adoption of secure-by-design principles into the modern SoC development flow. This is offered through a variety of solutions across verification steps, including static, formal, and dynamic verification. This solution flow mimics the industry-standard logical verification flow to enable easy adoption into organization’s tool belt.

Coming Soon – GenAI-powered Security Property Generation for Formal Verification

SVx, one of our first GenAI-powered solutions, is a key component of our suite, enabling automated security property generation for SoC verification. Formal verification is an increasingly utilized verification capability to identify stringent bugs. However, the effectiveness of its deployment relies on the quality of assertions given to the formal tool. This gets worsened for verification of security-related properties as security expertise is needed. With SVx, we automate the generation of natural language properties and the corresponding SystemVerilog assertions that user can then feed to a formal verification tool. This does not replace existing formal verification techniques but works as a sidecar to existing tools.

Caspia Technologies’ GenAI-driven approach revolutionizes security verification by making SoC designs more secure by design while reducing verification costs and effort. As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, automated verification solutions like SVx will play a critical role in ensuring trust and reliability in next-generation semiconductor technologies.