Bradley Evans

Chipyard: Running a simple Hello World binary against a RISC-V Rocket core

This guide assumes that you have finished all the steps in my previous post, Setting Up a RISC-V Security Testing Environment and have managed to generate a basic binary that simulates a RISC-V Rocket core using Verilator. Once Chipyard is basically up and running, you should have a chipyard folder that looks more or less […]

Chipyard: Setting up a RISC-V security testing environment

My master’s thesis work has been in RISC-V security, a topic that has gained substantial relevance following major flaws discovered in popular (but very proprietary) CPU cores manufactured by companies like Intel, ARM, and AMD. An advantage to researchers interested in investigating micro architecture security is that RISC-V cores are completely open source, available to […]

Generating Random Tests with Python and Pytest

One of the things I’m trying to incorporate into my work on cfltools is highly integrated unit testing. Since cfltools is a forensic utility, it’s critical that I am able to show that the program creates predictable, consistent outputs when fed a variety of data. This ensures that the products of the tool have legally […]