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RV-Sec5: Enhancing RISC-V Security Evaluation via Targeted ISA-Level Instrumentation using gem5
Acte de colloque   Open Access

RV-Sec5: Enhancing RISC-V Security Evaluation via Targeted ISA-Level Instrumentation using gem5

Muhammad Awais, Maria Mushtaq, Lirida Naviner, Florent Bruguier et Jawad Haj Yahya
17th Australasian Information Security Conference (AISC 2026 ) (Melbourne, Australia, 11/02/2026–12/02/2026)

Résumé

gem5 ISA Security Pre-silicon Validation Side-channel Profiling Hardware Security Embedded Systems Hardware Attacks Attacks Simulation
The modularity of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) has accelerated its adoption in security-critical domains, yet it introduces significant challenges for pre-silicon security validation. Current evaluation methods often rely on high-level emulation that overlooks microarchitectural side effects or post-silicon testing that identifies vulnerabilities too late in the design cycle. This paper presents RV-Sec5, a systematic framework for ISA-level security evaluation that leverages the gem5 simulator. Unlike standard simulators, RV-Sec5 introduces a methodology to map high-level security invariants-such as privilege isolation and memory protection-directly to automated, cycle-accurate instrumentation points within the ISA decoder. This approach bridges the semantic gap between abstract security policies and low-level hardware execution. We demonstrate the framework's efficacy through a case study involving unauthorized Control and Status Register (CSR) modifications, showing how RV-Sec5 detects privilege escalation attempts and monitors microarchitectural anomalies, such as TLB flushes and cache state changes, in real-time.

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