One Model, Multiple Verifications: A Framework for Holistic Security Assurance

As the complexity and heterogeneity of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs continue to grow, ensuring their security has become a critical task. Traditional security verification approaches often require multiple models, simulations, and emulations, resulting in increased complexity, cost, and time-to-market. We present a novel framework for model-based security verification, enabling the verification of security properties across multiple domains and platforms with a single abstract model. The employment of an abstract model facilitates the generation of tests in targeted languages for various levels of integration. Our approach leverages the Portable Test and Stimulus Standard (PSS) to create an abstract model of the design at the Intellectual Property (IP) level, which can be reused for SoC-level simulation and emulation. This enables a single model to be verified across multiple domains and platforms, reducing complexity, and improving accuracy and scalability. We illustrate the practical applicability of our framework by implementing it on a security controller IP. This is achieved by using a single model to verify security properties across multiple platforms, such as simulation and emulation, demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness.