Federal Cooperative Agreement Award Summary

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a Cooperative Agreement valued at $1,469,443 to the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) program (CFDA 47.084) on October 1, 2025, with a completion date of September 30, 2027. The award funds development and deployment of VULCAN (Vulnerability Consistency Analyzer), a framework designed to detect and mitigate security vulnerabilities in the GEM5 open-source hardware simulator before they are introduced to the codebase. VULCAN combines expertise across simulator design, computer architecture, programming languages, security, and language modeling to identify inconsistencies between commit messages and code changes and to discover known hardware vulnerabilities.

The project addresses a critical national security concern, as GEM5 is widely used by academia, industry, and national laboratories for early-stage hardware-software design exploration. Because computer architecture designs prototyped in GEM5 are often incorporated directly into real hardware, vulnerabilities in the simulator could inadvertently introduce security flaws into commercial hardware that cannot be easily patched, with potential implications for national infrastructure. By strengthening GEM5's security posture through VULCAN's four-component framework, the award enables U.S. industry and national laboratory practitioners to safely prototype cutting-edge hardware designs while reducing the risk of security vulnerabilities propagating into finished products.