Friday, Oct. 17, 2025
10:20 – 11:10 a.m. in ETB 1020
Chen Chen
Ph.D. student, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Texas A&M University
Title: “Hardware Fuzzing to Secure Modern Hardware“
Abstract:
Hardware is at the heart of computing systems. However, recent years have seen increased attacks exploiting hardware vulnerabilities and exploits, which even traditional software-based protections cannot prevent. Hardware fuzzing has shown promise in detecting vulnerabilities in large-scale designs, such as modern processors. In this talk, I will first introduce hardware fuzzing as a method for finding vulnerabilities and its limitations. Then, I will detail how fuzzing techniques can be integrated with existing methods, such as formal verification and information flow tracking, to tackle these limitations. Finally, I will discuss improving the efficiency of hardware fuzzing by leveraging knowledge from prior processor generations and future works.
Biography:
Chen Chen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, supervised by Dr. JV. Rajendran. He obtained a B.S. degree from Purdue University. His research interest is hardware security. He has published papers at top-tier conferences like USENIX Security, DAC, ICCAD, and DATE. He has won the Distinguished Paper Award and the Distinguished Artifact Evaluation Reviewer Award at USENIX Sec’24. He also co-organizes HackTheSilicon, the world’s largest hardware security capture-the-flag competitions, co-located with DAC, USENIX Security, CHES, and DATE.
Chen Chen’s homepage: www.chenc.contact/