Title: BugWhisperer: Fine-Tuning LLMs for SoC Hardware Vulnerability Detection Show Chinese title

Title: BugWhisperer：用于SoC硬件漏洞检测的LLMs微调

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. Show Chinese abstract

Abstract: 片上系统（SoC）的安全性验证目前面临着由于手动、劳动密集且缺乏灵活性的方法所导致的挑战。这些问题限制了安全协议的可扩展性和有效性，使得在寄存器传输级（RTL）检测漏洞变得困难。本文提出了一种名为BugWhisperer的新框架，该框架利用经过专门微调的大语言模型（LLM）来解决这些挑战。通过增强LLM的硬件安全知识，并利用其文本推理和知识迁移能力，这种方法实现了验证过程的自动化，并提高了其适应性和可重用性。我们引入了一个开源、经过微调的LLM，专为检测SoC设计中的安全漏洞而设计。我们的研究结果显示，这种定制化的LLM有效地提升了安全性验证过程的效率和灵活性。此外，我们还介绍了一个全面的硬件漏洞数据库，它支持本项工作，并将进一步协助研究社区提升安全性验证过程。