  Hardware security vulnerabilities in computing systems compromise the
security defenses of not only the hardware but also the software running on it.
Recent research has shown that hardware fuzzing is a promising technique to
efficiently detect such vulnerabilities in large-scale designs such as modern
processors. However, the current fuzzing techniques do not adjust their
strategies dynamically toward faster and higher design space exploration,
resulting in slow vulnerability detection, evident through their low design
coverage. To address this problem, we propose PSOFuzz, which uses particle
swarm optimization (PSO) to schedule the mutation operators and to generate
initial input programs dynamically with the objective of detecting
vulnerabilities quickly. Unlike traditional PSO, which finds a single optimal
solution, we use a modified PSO that dynamically computes the optimal solution
for selecting mutation operators required to explore new design regions in
hardware. We also address the challenge of inefficient initial seed generation
by employing PSO-based seed generation. Including these optimizations, our
final formulation outperforms fuzzers without PSO. Experiments show that
PSOFuzz achieves up to 15.25$\times$ speedup for vulnerability detection and up
to 2.22$\times$ speedup for coverage compared to the state-of-the-art
simulation-based hardware fuzzer.

Cryptography and Security