BugWhisperer: Fine-Tuning LLMs for SoC Hardware Vulnerability Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces BugWhisperer, a fine-tuned LLM framework that automates and enhances security vulnerability detection in SoC hardware designs, improving scalability and effectiveness over manual methods.

Contribution

It presents a specialized, open-source LLM for SoC security verification, along with a comprehensive vulnerability database, advancing automation and knowledge transfer in hardware security.

Findings

The fine-tuned LLM improves detection efficiency.

The framework enhances verification flexibility.

The vulnerability database supports research and development.

Abstract

The current landscape of system-on-chips (SoCs) security verification faces challenges due to manual, labor-intensive, and inflexible methodologies. These issues limit the scalability and effectiveness of security protocols, making bug detection at the Register-Transfer Level (RTL) difficult. This paper proposes a new framework named BugWhisperer that utilizes a specialized, fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM) to address these challenges. By enhancing the LLM's hardware security knowledge and leveraging its capabilities for text inference and knowledge transfer, this approach automates and improves the adaptability and reusability of the verification process. We introduce an open-source, fine-tuned LLM specifically designed for detecting security vulnerabilities in SoC designs. Our findings demonstrate that this tailored LLM effectively enhances the efficiency and flexibility of the security verification process. Additionally, we introduce a comprehensive hardware vulnerability database that supports this work and will further assist the research community in enhancing the security verification process.