Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/24/2026
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Speaker
Dr. Farimah Farahmandi is the Wally Rhines Endowed Professor in Hardware Security in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Florida
Abstract
Hardware security verification is a multi-stage process that requires engineers to navigate complex design analyses, threat considerations, and verification strategies. Engineers often need security-focused guidance throughout this process, yet current verification environments provide little structured support for such assistance. Although conversational AI has the potential to provide on-demand guidance, directly relying on general-purpose chatbots such as OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Gemini is risky because these systems can hallucinate and often rely on static or outdated knowledge.
We present an agentic framework for hardware security verification, a domain-specialized conversational assistant designed to revolutionize existing verification workflows by delivering context-aware security guidance. Our approach employs a retrieval-augmented, multi-agent workflow that can generate security test plans and testbenches, identify security-critical assets, perform threat modeling, derive security properties, and automatically interface with EDA tools such as simulators, model checkers, and equivalence checkers. The framework further analyzes tool outputs and develops countermeasures to identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities in RTL designs effectively.
Biography
Dr. Farimah Farahmandi is the Walden Rhines Endowed Professor in Hardware Security in the ECE department at the University of Florida. She also serves as the Associate Director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) at UF. Her research focuses on hardware security verification, formal methods, and fault-injection attack analysis, resulting in 8 books and over 150 publications in these fields. For her contributions, she is a recipient of 11 best paper and nomination awards, and was recognized with the Best Assistant Professor Award at UF (2024), Pramod Khargonekar Excellence Award for the Best Assistant Professor going through tenure process (2025), UF 40 Under 40 Gator Outstanding Alumni Award, the ECE Excellence in Service Award (2023), and the ECE Excellence in Research Award (2022) at UF. She also received the prestigious ACM/IEEE DAC Under 40 Innovators Award (2024), Young Faculty Award from SRC (2022), the NSF CAREER Award (2024), and Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2026).
