`vcd2df` - Data Science Workflows for Hardware Security

Hardware Security at Willamette is a research group studying the hardware-software interface of security critical services. Within our program, we noticed many researchers spent considerable development time learning to understand and manually parse traces-of-execution of hardware designs which are used to identifying whether vulnerabilities or weaknesses arise at the hardware, software, or interface level. We propose `vcd2df`, a collection of libraries that translate the outputs of simulated hardware execution, as "value change dumps" into modern data science workflows as "data frames", to standardize program verification across the hardware and software levels. We describe our approach, its benefits, and lessons learned from the process of packaging and distributing these libraries for our security research program.

Paper | Presentation

Calvin Deutschbein

Professor Calvin Deutschbein is computer security and systems researcher and educator. They completed their Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the direction of Professor Cynthia Sturton. Their research focuses on computer security, especially at the level of hardware design, and in the usage of data mining and design specification to achieve security goals.

Prior to joining Willamette, Calvin has years of teaching experience at the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Elon University, the number one ranked US News and World Report institution for undergraduate education. Calvin is especially passionate about expanding the impact of computing education and career and job placements for students. Calvin's research on hardware security has been well received by industry partners, including invited talks for Intel Corporation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and Cycuity (formerly Tortuga Logic). Within the research community, they have given invited talks at hardware security oriented venues such as SEC-RISCV and clean-slate.

Jimmy Osyler

Jimmy Ostler is an undergraduate researcher in Mathematics and Computer Science (Engineering) at Willamette University. Jimmy Ostler is the inaugural president of the Willamette Computer Science Student Association and is a developmental intern at Cloudflare.