Deep learning (DL)-based side-channel analysis (SCA) has posed a severe challenge to the security and privacy of embedded devices. During its execution, an attacker exploits physical SCA leakages collected from profiling devices to create a DL model for recovering secret information from victim devices. Despite this success, recent works have demonstrated that certain countermeasures, such as random delay interrupts or clock jitters, would make these attacks more complex and less practical in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we present a novel denoising scheme that exploits the U-Net model to pre-process SCA traces for “noises” (i.e., countermeasures) removal. Specifically, we first pre-train the U-Net model on the paired noisy-clean profiling traces to obtain suitable parameters. This model is then fine-tuned on the noisy-only traces collected from the attacking device. The well-trained model will be finally deployed on the attacking device to remove the noises (i.e., countermeasures) from the measured power traces. In particular, a new inductive transfer learning method is also utilized in our scheme to transfer knowledge learned from the source domain (i.e., profiling device) to the target domain (i.e., attacking device) to improve the model’s generalization ability. During our experimental evaluations, we conduct a detailed analysis of various countermeasures separately or combined and show that the proposed denoising model outperforms current state-of-the-art work by a large margin, e.g., a reduction of at least 30% in computation costs and 5× in guessing entropy.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have precipitated emerging trends towards intelligent automation. However, integrating LLMs into the hardware debug domain encounters challenges: the datasets for LLMs for hardware are often plagued by a dual dilemma – scarcity and subpar quality. Traditional hardware debug approaches that rely on experienced labor to generate detailed prompts are not cheaply scalable. Similarly, strategies that depend on existing LLMs and randomly generated prompts fail to achieve sufficient reliability. We propose a directed, semi-synthetic data synthetic method that leverages version control information and journalistic event descriptions. To produce high-quality data, this approach utilizes version control data from hardware projects combined with the 5W1H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, How) journalistic principles. It facilitates the linear scaling of dataset volumes without depending on skilled labor. We have implemented this method on a collected dataset of open-source hardware designs and fine-tuned fifteen general-purpose LLMs to enable their capability in hardware debugging tasks, thereby validating the efficacy of our approach.

This paper presents LLM4SecHW, a novel framework for hardware debugging that leverages domain specific Large Language Model (LLM). Despite the success of LLMs in automating various software development tasks, their application in the hardware security domain has been limited due to the constraints of commercial LLMs and the scarcity of domain specific data. To address these challenges, we propose a unique approach to compile a dataset of open source hardware design defects and their remediation steps, utilizing version control data. This dataset provides a substantial foundation for training machine learning models for hardware. LLM4SecHW employs fine tuning of medium sized LLMs based on this dataset, enabling the identification and rectification of bugs in hardware designs. This pioneering approach offers a reference workflow for the application of fine tuning domain specific LLMs in other research areas. We evaluate the performance of our proposed system on various open source hardware designs, demonstrating its efficacy in accurately identifying and correcting defects. Our work brings a new perspective on automating the quality control process in hardware design.