BugWhisperer is an open-source approach designed to automate the detection of security vulnerabilities in system-on-chip (SoC) designs at the Register-Transfer Level (RTL). By fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with domain-specific hardware security knowledge, the framework addresses the limitations of traditional, manual security verification methods. The work leverages a comprehensive hardware vulnerability database—built using golden benchmarks and augmented through design replication—to generate diverse Verilog code samples encapsulating 13 distinct vulnerability types. This enables the fine-tuned model to not only detect known vulnerabilities but also generalize across varied coding styles and architectures.
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Fine-Tuned LLMs:
The approach fine-tunes open-source Mistral-7B-Instruct-v-03 model specifically for hardware security tasks, enabling them to detect subtle vulnerabilities that general-purpose LLMs often miss.
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Performance Gains:
Fine-tuning improves detection accuracy dramatically (Mistral-7B-instruct achieves 84.8% accuracy compared to a non-fine-tuned baseline of 42.5%), demonstrating that open-source models can become cost-effective, transparent alternatives to proprietary solutions.
