The Hardware Security @ UNC research group, led by Prof. Cynthia Sturton, develops the algorithms and tools to help hardware designers find security vulnerabilities early in the design stage. We are developing new specification mining techniques to automatically identify the properties of a hardware design that are critical to security, and we are building Coppelia, a tool for the symbolic execution of a hardware design that enables bug finding, exploit generation, assertion refinement, or patch verification.
Our research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Semiconductor Research Corporation, Intel, Google, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.