VLSI Design IP Protection: Solutions, New Challenges, and Opportunities

It has been a decade since the need of VLSI design intellectual property (IP) protection was identified [1,2]. The goals of IP protection are 1) to enable IP providers to protect their IPs against unauthorized use, 2) to protect all types of design data used to produce and deliver IPs, 3) to detect the use of IPs, and 4) to trace the use of IPs [3]. There are significant advances from both industry and academic towards these goals. However, do we have solutions to achieve all these goals? What are the current state-of-the-art IP protection techniques? Do they meet the protection requirement designers sought for? What are the (new) challenges and is there any feasible answer to them in the foreseeable future? This paper addresses these questions and provides possible solutions mainly from academia point of view. Several successful industry practice and ongoing efforts are also discussed briefly

Publicly Detectable Watermarking for Intellectual Property Authentication in VLSI Design

Highlighted with the newly released intellectual property (IP) protection white paper by VSI Alliance, the protection of virtual components or IPs in very large scale integration (VLSI) design has received a great deal of attention recently. Digital signature/watermark is one of the most promising solutions among the known protection mechanisms. It provides desirable proof of authorship without rendering the IP useless. However, it makes the watermark detection, which is as important as watermarking, an NP-hard problem. In fact, the tradeoff between hard-to-attack and easy-to-detect and the lack of efficient detection schemes are the major obstacles for digital signatures to thrive. In this paper, the authors propose a new watermarking method which allows the watermark to be publicly detected without losing its strength and security. The basic idea is to create a cryptographically strong pseudo-random watermark, embed it into the original problem as a special (which the authors call mutual exclusive) constraint, and make it public. The authors combine data integrity technique and the unique characteristics in the design of VLSI IPs such that adversaries will not gain any advantage from the public watermarking for forgery. This new technique is compatible with the existing constraint-based watermarking/fingerprinting techniques. The resulting public–private watermark maintains the strength of a watermark and provides easy detectability with little design overhead. The authors build the mathematical framework for this approach based on the concept of mutual exclusive constraints. They use popular VLSI CAD problems, namely technology mapping, partitioning, graph coloring, FPGA design, and Boolean satisfiability, to demonstrate the public watermark’s easy detectability, high credibility, low design overhead, and robustness

A survey on security analysis of machine learning-oriented hardware and software intellectual property

Intellectual Property (IP) includes ideas, innovations, methodologies, works of authorship (viz., literary and artistic works), emblems, brands, images, etc. This property is intangible since it is pertinent to the human intellect. Therefore, IP entities are indisputably vulnerable to infringements and modifications without the owner’s consent. IP protection regulations have been deployed and are still in practice, including patents, copyrights, contracts, trademarks, trade secrets, etc., to address these challenges. Unfortunately, these protections are insufficient to keep IP entities from being changed or stolen without permission. As for this, some IPs require hardware IP protection mechanisms, and others require software IP protection techniques. To secure these IPs, researchers have explored the domain of Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) using different approaches. In this paper, we discuss the existing IP rights and concurrent breakthroughs in the field of IPP research; provide discussions on hardware IP and software IP attacks and defense techniques; summarize different applications of IP protection; and lastly, identify the challenges and future research prospects in hardware and software IP security

Graduate Course Descriptions, 2005 Fall

Wright State University graduate course descriptions from Fall 2005

Graduate Course Descriptions, 2006 Winter

Wright State University graduate course descriptions from Winter 2006

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

A Survey on Security Threats and Countermeasures in IEEE Test Standards

International audienceEditor's note: Test infrastructure has been shown to be a portal for hackers. This article reviews the threats and countermeasures for IEEE test infrastructure standards

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.