Training Virtual Security Verification Engineers for System-on-Chip Security Assurance

Abstract: Security verification of modern System-on-Chips (SoCs) requires engineers to perform a wide range of complex tasks, including identifying security-critical assets, modeling treats, developing security properties, generating testbenches, and analyzing verification results. These activities demand significant expertise and engineering effort, creating a major bottleneck in achieving comprehensive security assurance. We present a framework for training AI-powered virtual security verification engineers that collaborate to accelerate SoC security verification. Each virtual engineer specializes in a particular verification task, such as threat modeling, asset identification, property generation, test development, or verification analysis, while collectively orchestrating industrial EDA tools including simulators and formal verification engines. By combining domain-specific knowledge, retrieval-augmented reasoning, and autonomous tool interaction, these virtual engineers reduce manual effort, improve verification coverage, and significantly accelerate verification closure.

Bio: Dr. Farimah Farahmandi is the Walden Rhines Endowed Professor in Hardware Security in the ECE department at the University of Florida. She also serves as the Director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) at UF. Her research focuses on hardware security verification, formal methods, and fault-injection attack analysis resulting in 8 books and over 150 publications in these fields. For her contributions, she is a recipient of 11 best paper and nomination awards and was recognized with the Best Assistant Professor Award at UF (2024), Pramod Khargonekar Excellence Award for the Best Assistant Professor going through tenure process (2025), UF 40 Under 40 Gator Outstanding Alumni Award, the ECE Excellence in Service Award (2023), and the ECE Excellence in Research Award (2022) at UF. She also received the prestigious ACM/IEEE DAC Under 40 Innovators Award (2024), Young Faculty Award from SRC (2022), the NSF CAREER Award (2024), and Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (YIP) Award (2026).

Website: https://farimah.ece.ufl.edu/