Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)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 (HwESS). 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. (c) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.86820632076Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)