Simple but Powerful Beginning: Metamorphic Verification Framework for Cryptographic Hardware Design

Complexity of cryptographic algorithm renders verification of cryptographic hardware design vulnerable to the oracle problem. We propose Minoan: the first opensource verification framework based on Metamorphic testing for cryptographic hardware design to mitigate the oracle problem. Minoan constructs six metamorphic relationships for cryptographic hardware design verification based on domain knowledge, and further designs the time-aware metamorphic relationship satisfiability checking mechanism to strengthen the integration of metamorphic testing with cryptographic hardware. Finally, the evaluation on public datasets from OpenCores shows that Minoan achieves promising results with detecting up to ${9 8 . 0 2 \%}$ bugs.