Assertain: Automated Security Assertion Generation Using Large Language Models
About
The increasing complexity of modern system-on-chip designs amplifies hardware security risks and makes manual security property specification a major bottleneck in formal property verification. This paper presents Assertain, an automated framework that integrates RTL design analysis, Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) mapping, and threat model intelligence to automatically generate security properties and executable SystemVerilog Assertions. Assertain leverages large language models with a self-reflection refinement mechanism to ensure both syntactic correctness and semantic consistency. Evaluated on 11 representative hardware designs, Assertain outperforms GPT-5 by 61.22%, 59.49%, and 67.92% in correct assertion generation, unique CWE coverage, and architectural flaw detection, respectively. These results demonstrate that Assertain significantly expands vulnerability coverage, improves assertion quality, and reduces manual effort in hardware security verification.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | Door Lock | Correct Assertions27 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | DMI_JTAG | Correct Assertions30 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | Password Verification | Correct Assertions21 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | CSR_Module | Assertion Count46 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | AES Buggy | Assertion Count31 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | MIPS | Correct Assertions Count44 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | uart | Correct Assertions Count33 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | Store_Unit | Correct Assertions Count50 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | MMU | Correct Assertions Count42 | 2 | |
| Hardware Security Assertion and Flaw Detection | I2C | Correct Assertions Count39 | 2 |