Watermarking FPGA Bitfile for Intellectual Property Protection

Intellectual property protection (IPP) of hardware designs is the most important requirement for many Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) intellectual property (IP) vendors. Digital watermarking has become an innovative technology for IPP in recent years. Existing watermarking techniques have successfully embedded watermark into IP cores. However, many of these techniques share two specific weaknesses: 1) They have extra overhead, and are likely to degrade performance of design; 2) vulnerability to removing attacks. We propose a novel watermarking technique to watermark FPGA bitfile for addressing these weaknesses. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed technique incurs zero overhead and it is robust against removing attacks

A Sequential Circuit-Based IP Watermarking Algorithm for Multiple Scan Chains in Design-for-Test

In Very Large Scale Integrated Circuits (VLSI) design, the existing Design-for-Test(DFT) based watermarking techniques usually insert watermark through reordering scan cells, which causes large resource overhead, low security and coverage rate of watermark detection. A novel scheme was proposed to watermark multiple scan chains in DFT for solving the problems. The proposed scheme adopts DFT scan test model of VLSI design, and uses a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) for pseudo random test vector generation. All of the test vectors are shifted in scan input for the construction of multiple scan chains with minimum correlation. Specific registers in multiple scan chains will be changed by the watermark circuit for watermarking the design. The watermark can be effectively detected without interference with normal function of the circuit, even after the chip is packaged. The experimental results on several ISCAS benchmarks show that the proposed scheme has lower resource overhead, probability of coincidence and higher coverage rate of watermark detection by comparing with the existing methods

Automatic low-cost IP watermarking technique based on output mark insertions

International audienceToday, although intellectual properties (IP) and their reuse are common, their use is causing design security issues: illegal copying, counterfeiting, and reverse engineering. IP watermarking is an efficient way to detect an unauthorized IP copy or a counterfeit. In this context, many interesting solutions have been proposed. However, few combine the watermarking process with synthesis. This article presents a new solution, i.e. automatic low cost IP watermarking included in the high-level synthesis process. The proposed method differs from those cited in the literature as the marking is not material, but is based on mathematical relationships between numeric values as inputs and outputs at specified times. Some implementation results with Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA that the proposed solution required a lower area and timing overhead than existing solutions

Improved method for image security based on chaotic-shuffle and chaotic-diffusion algorithms

In this paper, we propose to enhance the security performance of the color image encryption algorithm which depends on multi-chaotic systems. The current cryptosystem utilized a pixel-chaotic-shuffle system to encode images, in which the time of shuffling is autonomous to the plain-image. Thus, it neglects to the picked plaintext and known-plaintext attacks. Also, the statistical features of the cryptosystem are not up to the standard. Along these lines, the security changes are encircled to make the above attacks infeasible and upgrade the statistical features also. It is accomplished by altering the pixel-chaotic-shuffle component and including another pixel-chaotic-diffusion system to it. The keys for diffusion of pixels are extracted from the same chaotic arrangements created in the past stage. The renovation investigations and studies are performed to exhibit that the refreshed version of cryptosystem has better statistical features and invulnerable to the picked plaintext and known plaintext attacks than the current algorithm

Digital image watermarking techniques

The ability to resolve ownership disputes and copyright infringement is difficult in the worldwide digital age. There is an increasing need to develop techniques that protect the owner of digital data. Digital Watermarking is a technique used to embed a known piece of digital data within another piece of digital data. The embedded piece of data acts as a fingerprint for the owner, allowing the protection of copyright, authentication of the data, and tracing of illegal copies. The goal of this thesis is to produce two watermarking tools and compare their effectiveness with that of other watermarking tools. One of the tools uses a spatial watermarking technique, while the other uses a frequency based spread spectrum technique. These represent the two current approaches to digital watermarking. Use of a standard benchmark is necessary to advance the science of digital watermarking. Until recently, there have been no standard metrics for deter mining the effectiveness of a particular watermarking scheme. Several recent papers propose standard procedures and metrics for comparing watermarking techniques. The proposed metrics and test bed imagery are used as the basis for comparison with other watermark techniques. Overall, the most successful techniques model themselves after data communications techniques. In this case, the image is similar to the atmosphere (medium) and the watermark message is the signal communicated through the medium. The spread spectrum technique yields results that in some cases are comparable to commercial watermarking tools. The spatial domain tool as implemented is inadequate for comparison with the commercial tools