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

Watermarking Techniques for Protecting Intellectual Properties in a Digital Environment

The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights for digital media has become an important issue in many countries of the world. There is increase in the popularity and accessibility of the Internet to record, edit, replicate and broadcast multimedia content which has necessitated a high demand to protect digital information against illegal uses, manipulations and distributions. Digital watermarking technique which is the process used to embed proprietary information into multimedia digital signal provides a robust solution to this problem. This paper reviews different aspects and techniques of digital watermarking for protecting digital contents. It also explores different application areas of digital watermarking such as copyright protection, broadcast monitoring, integrity protection etc.Facultad de Informátic

Watermarking Techniques for Protecting Intellectual Properties in a Digital Environment

The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights for digital media has become an important issue in many countries of the world. There is increase in the popularity and accessibility of the Internet to record, edit, replicate and broadcast multimedia content which has necessitated a high demand to protect digital information against illegal uses, manipulations and distributions. Digital watermarking technique which is the process used to embed proprietary information into multimedia digital signal provides a robust solution to this problem. This paper reviews different aspects and techniques of digital watermarking for protecting digital contents. It also explores different application areas of digital watermarking such as copyright protection, broadcast monitoring, integrity protection etc.Facultad de Informátic

A Survey on IP Watermarking Techniques

Intellectual property (IP) block reuse is essential for facilitating the design process of system-on-a-chip. Sharing IP designs poses significant high security risks. Recently, digital watermarking emerged as a candidate solution for copyright protection of IP blocks. In this paper, we survey and classify different techniques used for watermarking IP designs. To this end, we defined several evaluation criteria, which can also be used as a benchmark for new IP watermarking developments. Furthermore, we established a comprehensive set of requirements for future IP watermarking techniques

Watermarking techniques for intellectual property protection in SOC designs

Sharing Intellectual Property (IP) blocks in today's competitive market poses significant high security risks. Creators and owners of IP designs want assurances that their content will not be illegally redistributed by consumers, and consumers want assurances that the content they buy is legitimate. Recently, digital watermarking emerged as a candidate solution for copyright protection of IP blocks. In this thesis, we propose a new approach for watermarking IP designs based on the embedding of the ownership proof as part of the IP design's finite state machine (FSM). The approach utilizes coinciding as well as unused transitions in the state transition graph of the design. Based on this approach, we have developed a robust watermarking framework, used for copyright protection, as well as fragile watermarking framework used for design authentication. For both frameworks, we developed related algorithms for watermark insertion and extraction. The developed techniques increase the robustness of the watermark and allow a secure implementation, hence enabling the development of the first public-key IP watermarking scheme at the FSM level. The algorithms have been implemented in a prototype tool that accepts IPs in VHDL. We also define evaluation criteria for IP watermarking, which we used for experimental measurements, and to compare between different algorithms. In order to integrate these proposed algorithms in the design cycle of industrial projects, we extend the above techniques to enable the watermarking of hierarchical and concurrent designs. Finally, we introduce and describe the first algorithm for watermarking hierarchical finite state machines (HFSMs

Intellectual Property Protection of Digital Cultural Heritage

Use of information and communication technologies are becoming a crucial part of our lives, which creates new opportunities for promoting Cultural Heritage through digital technologies and the internet. Use of techniques for intellectual property protection of digital content by cultural heritage institutions has gotten little attention up to this point. As technology evolves rapidly, concerns about protecting intellectual property have arisen, as digital content could be modified using freely available software. The paper focuses on watermarking techniques that could be used in the digitization process and analyses of algorithms for protecting intellectual property of digital heritage content

Semantics-based software watermarking by abstract interpretation

Software watermarking is a software protection technique used to defend the intellectual property of proprietary code. In particular, software watermarking aims at preventing software piracy by embedding a signature, i.e. an identier reliably representing the owner, in the code. When an illegal copy is made, the owner can claim his/her identity by extracting the signature. It is important to hide the signature in the program in order to make it dicult for the attacker to detect, tamper or remove it. In this work we present a formal framework for software watermarking, based on program semantics and abstract interpretation, where attackers are modeled as abstract interpreters. In this setting we can prove that the ability to identify signatures can be modeled as a completeness property of the attackers in the abstract interpretation framework. Indeed, hiding a signature in the code corresponds to embed it as a semantic property that can be retrieved only by attackers that are complete for it. Any abstract interpreter that is not complete for the property specifying the signature cannot detect, tamper or remove it. We formalize in the proposed framework the major quality features of a software watermarking technique: secrecy, resilience, transparence and accuracy. This provides an unifying framework for interpreting both watermarking schemes and attacks, and it allows us to formally compare the quality of dierent watermarking techniques. Indeed, a large number of watermarking techniques exist in the literature and they are typically evaluated with respect to their secrecy, resilience, transparence and accuracy to attacks. Formally identifying the attacks for which a watermarking scheme is secret, resilient, transparent or accurate can be a complex and error-prone task, since attacks and watermarking schemes are typically dened in dierent settings and using dierent languages (e.g. program transformation vs. program analysis), complicating the task of comparing one against the others