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

IP protection for DSP algorithms\u27 FPGA implementation.

With today\u27s system-on-chip (SOC) technology, we are able to design larger and more complicated application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) in shorter time period. The key point of the success of SOC technology is the reuse of intellectual property (IP) cores. Consequently the copyright protection for these IP cores becomes the major concern for the development pace of SOC technology. Watermarking technology has been proved to be an effective way of copyright protection. In this thesis, the author presents two new watermarking algorithms respectively at algorithm level and FPGA layout level. The simulations and implementation results show that the new proposals have much less design and hardware implementation overheads, lower watermark embedding and extraction cost, as well as higher security strength, compared to the previously proposed methods.Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .D39. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-03, page: 0929. Advisers: H. K. Kwan; H. Wu. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

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

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF WATERMARKING APPROACH FOR VLSI DESIGN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION

VLSI technology brought revolution in EDA industry. Fabrication of complicated system on a chip is possible by using reusable module called Intellectual Property (IP) core. IP cores that became an integral part of the electronic design industry influenced and had a rather significant and almost incomparable impact with respect to system designing in any chip. IP designs for any organization are imperative; contrary, IP designs that are shared can significantly cause high security risks. The majority of IP’s require time as well as effort for purposes of designing and verification, however there still remains the possibility of these being copied or minor modifications to hide proof of ownership. To overcome this problem watermarking technique is recommended for IP Core protection. Watermark insertion in multilevel increases the security of the system. In this paper the ownership information is inserted in state transition outputs of State Transition Graph employing hierarchical representation of Finite state Machine (FSM) and subsequently in the netlist level by embedding watermark in the delay between the states. Watermark insertion at two levels increases the security of the design. Signature generation uses cryptographic algorithm for enhancing the security of the IP core designs. The experimental results show that performance is improved

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

A Survey of hardware protection of design data for integrated circuits and intellectual properties

International audienceThis paper reviews the current situation regarding design protection in the microelectronics industry. Over the past ten years, the designers of integrated circuits and intellectual properties have faced increasing threats including counterfeiting, reverse-engineering and theft. This is now a critical issue for the microelectronics industry, mainly for fabless designers and intellectual properties designers. Coupled with increasing pressure to decrease the cost and increase the performance of integrated circuits, the design of a secure, efficient, lightweight protection scheme for design data is a serious challenge for the hardware security community. However, several published works propose different ways to protect design data including functional locking, hardware obfuscation, and IC/IP identification. This paper presents a survey of academic research on the protection of design data. It concludes with the need to design an efficient protection scheme based on several properties

A Chaotic IP Watermarking in Physical Layout Level Based on FPGA

A new chaotic map based IP (Intellectual Property) watermarking scheme at physical design level is presented. An encrypted watermark is embedded into the physical layout of a circuit by configuring LUT (Lookup Table) as specific functions when it is placed and routed onto the FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array). The main contribution is the use of multiple chaotic maps in the processes of watermark design and embedding, which efficiently improves the security of watermark. A hashed chaotic sequence is used to scramble the watermark. Secondly, two pseudo-random sequences are generated by using chaotic maps. One is used to determine unused LUT locations, and the other divides the watermark into groups. The watermark identifies original owner and is difficult to detect. This scheme was tested on a Xilinx Virtex XCV600-6bg432 FPGA. The experimental results show that our method has low impact on functionality, short path delay and high robustness in comparison with other methods

Hardware and Software Codesign of a JPEG2000 Watermarking Encoder

Analog technology has been around for a long time. The use of analog technology is necessary since we live in an analog world. However, the transmission and storage of analog technology is more complicated and in many cases less efficient than digital technology. Digital technology, on the other hand, provides fast means to be transmitted and stored. Digital technology continues to grow and it is more widely used than ever before. However, with the advent of new technology that can reproduce digital documents or images with unprecedented accuracy, it poses a risk to the intellectual rights of many artists and also on personal security. One way to protect intellectual rights of digital works is by embedding watermarks in them. The watermarks can be visible or invisible depending on the application and the final objective of the intellectual work. This thesis deals with watermarking images in the discrete wavelet transform domain. The watermarking process was done using the JPEG2000 compression standard as a platform. The hardware implementation was achieved using the ALTERA DSP Builder and SIMULINK software to program the DE2 ALTERA FPGA board. The JPEG2000 color transform and the wavelet transformation blocks were implemented using the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) configuration