Chapter 7
Security Verification
Security of a system-on-chip (SoC) can be weakened by exploiting the inherent and potential vulnerabilities of the intellectual property (IP) cores used to implement the design as well as the interaction among the IPs. These vulnerabilities not only increase the security verification effort but also can increase design complexity and time-to-market. If the design and verification engineers are equipped with a comprehensive set of security properties at the early stage of a design process, SoC security validation effort can be greatly reduced. This chapter explains how one can use property-based verification for security validation of designs. We describe in detail how to identify the security assets and threat models needed to build security attributes and describe how security attributes are developed to protect against security vulnerabilities. Finally, we provide a step-by-step process on how to validate the generated assertions with design examples.