FORTUNA—A framework for the design and development of hardware-based secure systems

•We extended and validated the logic-probabilistic security framework FORTUNA.•We could conduct security analysis semi-automatically on hardware-based systems.•With the tool we found an novel architectural flaw on the SPARC V8, V9 processor.

Security requires a holistic view. In this work we contribute to this goal by taking a new viewpoint, with the proposal of the logic-probabilistic framework FORTUNA to support the design and development of hardware-based-security systems (HwBSS). It extends and further substantiates our ideas presented in a previous conference paper (Gallo et al., 2011). Our contributions in this article are: (a) to extend and validate FORTUNA, and (b) to illustrate its effectiveness uncovering an unreported SPARC V8 architectural security flaw.