Hardware IP protection by exploiting IP vendor's proteogenomic BioMarker as digital watermark during behavioral...

Area of Science:

• Computer Engineering
• Digital Hardware Design
• Intellectual Property Protection

Background:

• Intellectual property (IP) piracy and false ownership claims pose significant threats to system-on-chip (SoC) designs and IP vendors.
• The digital hardware design community faces increasing concerns regarding IP design piracy.
• Existing protection methods may lack robust security against sophisticated piracy techniques.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel behavioral synthesis-based hardware IP protection methodology.
• To develop a system for detecting IP piracy and refuting false ownership claims.
• To leverage proteogenomic bio-markers as a unique identifier for IP authentication.

Main Methods:

• Exploiting the IP vendor's proteogenomic bio-marker as a digital watermark (BioW-IPP).
• Generating a robust hardware watermark using the bio-watermark as secret digital evidence (BW-ID).
• Embedding the watermark during the behavioral synthesis/high-level synthesis (HLS) register allocation phase, ensuring minimal design overhead.

Main Results:

• The proposed BioW-IPP approach offers enhanced security against IP piracy and false ownership claims.
• Achieved lower probability of coincidence (watermark collision) compared to prior methods.
• Demonstrated higher tamper tolerance with nominal design overhead.

Conclusions:

• The proteogenomic signature bio-watermark provides a secure and efficient solution for hardware IP protection.
• The method effectively safeguards IP vendor rights and enhances SoC design reliability.
• This approach represents a significant advancement in combating digital hardware piracy.