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Hardware security creates a hardware-based security foundation for secure and reliable operation of systems and applications used in our modern life. The presence of design for security, security assurance, and general security design life cycle practices in product life cycle of many large semiconductor design and manufacturing companies these days indicates that the importance of hardware security has been very well observed in industry. However, the high cost, time, and effort for building security into designs and assuring their security - due to using many manual processes - is still an important obstacle for economy of secure product development. This paper presents several promising directions for automation of design for security and security assurance practices to reduce the overall time and cost of secure product development. First, we present security verification challenges of SoCs, possible vulnerabilities that could be introduced inadvertently by tools mapping a design model in one level of abstraction to its lower level, and our solution to the problem by automatically mapping security properties from one level to its lower level incorporating techniques for extension and expansion of the properties. Then, we discuss the foundation necessary for further automation of formal security analysis of a design by incorporating threat model and common security vulnerabilities into an intermediate representation of a hardware model to be used to automatically determine if there is a chance for direct or indirect flow of information to compromise confidentiality or integrity of security assets. Finally, we discuss a pre-silicon-based framework for practical and time-and-cost effective power-side channel leakage analysis, root-causing the side-channel leakage by using the automatically generated leakage profile of circuit nodes, providing insight to mitigate the side-channel leakage by addressing the high leakage nodes, and assuring the effectiveness of the mitigation by reprofiling the leakage to prove its acceptable level of elimination. We hope that sharing these efforts and ideas with the security research community can accelerate the evolution of security-aware CAD tools targeted to design for security and security assurance to enrich the ecosystem to have tools from multiple vendors with more capabilities and higher performance. 

Isadora is a methodology for creating information flow specifications of hardware designs. The methodology combines information flow tracking and specification mining to produce a set of information flow properties that are suitable for use during the security validation process, and which support a better understanding of the security posture of the design. Isadora is fully automated; the user provides only the design under consideration and a testbench and need not supply a threat model nor security specifications. We evaluate Isadora on a RISC-V processor plus two designs related to SoC access control. Isadora generates security properties that align with those suggested by the Common Weakness Enumerations (CWEs), and in the case of the SoC designs, align with the properties written manually by security experts.