Verifying the security of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs against hardware vulnerabilities is challenging because of the increasing complexity of SoCs, the diverse sources of vulnerabilities, and the need for comprehensive testing to identify potential security threats. In this paper, we propose RL-TPG, a novel framework that combines traditional verification with hardware security verification using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in Register Transfer Level (RTL) design. Significant research has been done on formal verification, semi-formal verification, automated security asset identification, and gate-level netlist. However, the area of automated simulation using machine learning at RTL is still unexplored. RL-TPG employs an RL agent that generates intelligent test patterns targeting security properties, verification coverage, and rare nodes of the design to achieve security property violation, increase verification coverage, and reach rare nodes. Our framework triggers all embedded vulnerabilities, achieving an average of 90% traditional coverage in an average of 192 seconds for the experimental benchmarks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, the results are compared with JasperGold by Cadence.

The recent evolution of deep neural networks (DNNs) has made running complex data analytics tasks, which range from natural language processing, object detection to autonomous cars, artificial intelligence (AI) warfare, cloud, healthcare, industrial robots, and edge devices feasible. The benefits of AI are indisputable. However, there are several concerns regarding the security of the deployed AI models, such as reverse engineering and Intellectual Property (IP) piracy. Accumulating a sufficiently large amount of data - building, training, improvement, and model deployment require immense human and computational power, making the process expensive. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to protect the model against IP infringement. We propose AIME, a novel watermarking framework that captures model inaccuracy during the training phase and converts it into the owner-specific unique signature. The watermark is embedded within the class mispredictions of the DNN model. Watermark extraction is performed when the model is queried by an owner-specific sequence of key inputs, and the signature is decoded from the sequence of model predictions. AIME works with negligible watermark embedding runtime overhead while preserving the accurate functionality of the DNN. We have performed a comprehensive evaluation of AIME, which models on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 dataset and corroborated its effectiveness, robustness, and performance.