Frequently Asked Questions
Hardware Security
Hardware security is important for risk mitigation and protecting the brand image of your company and its resources. By implementing secure development processes during the early stages of semiconductor design, organizations can ensure their products are more secure and less prone to cyberattacks. This helps to reduce overall risk and ensures compliance with industry standards and regulations.
While encryption and HRoT are necessary components of a secure system, it is also important to ensure that these security mechanisms are properly configured and integrated, and do not have any vulnerabilities that can be exploited. A proactive approach to security involves ongoing vulnerability analysis, verification, and testing of these security mechanisms to ensure their effectiveness.
Cycuity makes it easy for organizations to write comprehensive and verifiable security rules and integrate them into their existing circuit design environment. By using Cycuity’s Radix technology, organizations can define, verify, and measure circuit security requirements throughout the semiconductor development process, allowing them to ensure that known and unexpected security issues have been identified and addressed prior to product manufacturing.
Any organization that develops semiconductors would benefit from adopting a proactive security approach using Cycuity’s Radix technology. This includes designs in the automotive, aerospace, industrial control, medical device, and consumer electronics industries. If your offerings require compliance with security regulations and standards like ISO 21434, ISO 26262 or UNECE R155, attention to the hardware circuit logic at the base of your offering is critical.
Security requirements are an essential step in ensuring the security of a system. They are developed early on as part of the hardware architecture and development process and compiled into a security specification document. Guided by security objectives and known weaknesses, such as those included in the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE),</a> each requirement is systematically derived by identifying the secure assets, documenting the security objectives, and protection mechanisms. These requirements are expressed independently from design and implementation details, and are built incrementally. They establish the central driver for the security verification plan and are key for ensuring security signoff.
It is best to start planning for security at the architectural level and implement it as early in the design as possible. By identifying and addressing weaknesses early on, organizations can have a higher level of confidence in their product security and the cost of remediating potential issues is much lower. Radix security rules can be written and applied at the block level and ported to SoC and system levels, making it easy to integrate enhanced security throughout the development process.
Security verification is the process of ensuring that a chip’s architecture and logic do not expose security vulnerabilities. It’s critical because many hardware flaws cannot be fixed once a chip is manufactured. Cycuity’s Radix products automate this process, enabling designers to validate security properties throughout the semiconductor design lifecycle.
What is the difference between security verification and functional verification ? In short, functional verification ensures correct operation and performance – confirming that the design behaves as intended. Security verification ensures that security protections are intact and validates that a design’s integrity and confidentialy cannot be exploited.
Radix
At a high level, formal verification tools and Radix approach security verification in different ways. Formal verification is a mathematical method of ensuring that a design behaves as intended. Formal works well at the basic block level but can be engineering intensive. Formal verification does not scale well in larger designs and in cases where firmware or software or memory is involved. Radix, on the other hand, offers a user-friendly way to define and verify comprehensive security requirements throughout the entire design process, including firmware and software. With Radix you get full visibility into security assets and can identify weaknesses and potential vulnerabilities at the system level.
Radix detects a wide range of security vulnerabilities, including over 80% of the weaknesses in the MITRE Hardware Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) database. Some examples of the type of vulnerabilities that can be detected include: key leakage from a Root of Trust module, incorrect data flows through interconnects that violate security access policy, software misconfigurations of encryption modules, microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities like <a href=”https://cycuity.com/type/blog/detecting-spectre-using-radix/“>Spectre and Meltdown</a>, as well as illegal data access through test and debug logic.
Radix automates the process of verifying security requirements by allowing designers to express them in plain English, then translate them into Radix security rules that can be automatically verified within the existing design verification environments. Radix security rules are reusable across design stages and multiple SoCs, allowing for more accurate and efficient verification across systems.
Any organization that develops semiconductors would benefit from adopting a proactive security approach using Cycuity’s Radix technology. This includes designs in the automotive, aerospace, industrial control, medical device, and consumer electronics industries. If your offerings require compliance with security regulations and standards like ISO 21434, ISO 26262 or UNECE R155, attention to the hardware foundation of your offering is critical.
Yes, Radix supports both Verilog and VHDL. In the case of a mixed environment, additional discussions may be needed to ensure proper integration and support.
With Information Flow Tracking, designers see what is happening to security assets during functional verification and system-level verification. It provides a way for designers to identify potential vulnerabilities by identifying underlying weaknesses and validate that the design is secure before release.
Radix enables a complete security methodology to provide security assurance from spec to compliance. By using Radix, manufacturers gain a comprehensive understanding of their chip designs and the logic-level security requirements needed for coverage of their chip design before it goes into production. With Radix, they can then identify potential vulnerabilities early on and fix them before tape-out, reducing the risk of security breaches and potential liabilities. Additionally, by automating the verification process, Radix helps increase overall efficiency in the security assurance process. Radix gives companies the confidence that their product is secure and compliant with industry standards.
Cycuity’s solutions are built to integrate with industry-standard verification workflows Engineers can use Cycuity’s Radix security products alongside existing simulation and emulation flows formal verification, and static analysis tools, ensuring continuous security verification without disrupting existing processes.
Interested teams can request a demo of Cycuity’s Radix platform to see how security verification integrates into their current chip design workflows. Cycuity also provides training, documentation, and technical support to help organizations embed hardware security into their verification processes.
Cycuity
Cycuity is a hardware security verification company that helps semiconductor and system developers identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities during chip design. Its flagship product, Radix, integrates directly into existing hardware design and verification workflows to ensure that chips are secure by design, protecting against threats before manufacturing.
Cycuity serves industries where silicon-level security is mission-critical, including automotive, aerospace, defense, data centers, and AI/ML hardware. Its tools help ensure compliance with safety and security standards like ISO-21434, DO-254, and NIST guidelines
Unlike traditional cybersecurity tools that operate at the software or system level, Cycuity focuses on hardware-level security verification — ensuring that chips are secure before fabrication. This unique approach helps prevent vulnerabilities that can’t be patched later, making Cycuity an essential partner in semiconductor security assurance.
Cycuity was formerly known as Tortuga Logic, a pioneering company in semiconductor hardware security. The rebrand to Cycuity reflects the company’s mission to build a secure silicon future by combining advanced security verification technologies with comprehensive cybersecurity methodologies across the entire hardware design lifecycle. The name Cycuity to represents the combination of cybersecurity and acuity, and the ability to provide unmatched visibility and intelligence for increased hardware security assurance.
Cycuity provides hardware security verification solutions that ensure chips powering AI accelerators, IoT devices, and autonomous vehicles are resilient to attacks. By integrating security into the chip design phase, Cycuity helps manufacturers identify and mitigate weaknesses and verify security protections throughout the design phase, providing traceability and documented evidence of compliance with cybersecurity standards.
Cycuity’s leadership team includes experts in semiconductor design, cybersecurity, and EDA technology, many with decades of experience from academia and the semiconductor industry. The company originated from research conducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and continues to contribute to hardware security innovation worldwide.
Cycuity collaborates with major semiconductor and EDA companies, as well as government and defense organizations. Its technology has been integrated into leading verification workflows and recognized for advancing trust and assurance in hardware design.
Cycuity is defining the future of silicon security by advancing the concept of built-in hardware trust. Its security verification technologies are enabling semiconductor companies to develop chips that are secure, compliant, and resilient against both known and emerging cyber threats — a key factor in securing the infrastructure behind AI, connected and critical systems.
CWE
Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) is a list of common software and hardware weaknesses developed and maintained by the MITRE Corporation. It is a comprehensive list of weaknesses that can be used to identify potential security risks in software and hardware systems.
CWE provides a comprehensive database of known software and hardware weaknesses that can be exploited by attackers. By referencing and leveraging the CWE database, development teams can ensure the derived security requirements cover all industry-established common weaknesses applicable to the threat model. Reporting coverage against the CWE database offers a quantifiable metric to transparently communicate what has been verified. Furthermore, the CWE database can provide a guide for deriving security requirements that may have been missed.
The CWE database is continuously updated as new vulnerabilities are discovered and added to the list. The MITRE Corporation regularly releases new versions of the database, with updates typically made monthly.
Level up your hardware security today
Get the confidence of end-to-end hardware security assurance throughout the product lifecycle. Contact us today to see how.