Hardware Security at Willamette is a Willamette University affiliated research group studying the hardware-software interface of security critical services. Within our program, we noticed many researchers spent considerable development time learning to understand and manually parse traces-of-execution of hardware designs which are used to identifying whether vulnerabilities or weaknesses arise at the hardware, software, or interface level. We propose the "RTL-Arrow" framework, a framework to compile performant binaries which bridge the hardware/data divide. We translate the outputs of simulated hardware execution, as "value change dumps" into modern data science workflows as cloud-ready "dataframes", to standardize program verification across the hardware and software levels. We describe our approach, its benefits, and lessons learned from the process of packaging and distributing these libraries for our security research program.

翻译：威拉米特大学硬件安全课题组是该校附属的一个研究团队，专注于安全关键服务中软硬件接口的研究。在项目开展过程中，我们注意到许多研究人员花费大量开发时间学习理解和手动解析硬件设计的执行轨迹，这些轨迹用于识别漏洞或薄弱环节究竟产生于硬件层面、软件层面还是接口层面。为此，我们提出"RTL-Arrow"框架，该框架能够编译生成高性能二进制程序，实现硬件与数据之间的桥接。我们将模拟硬件执行输出的"数值变化转储"转化为现代数据科学工作流中可用的云端"数据帧"，从而在硬件与软件层面实现程序验证的标准化。本文详细阐述了该方法、其优势以及在为安全研究项目打包和分发这些库过程中总结的经验教训。