Behavioral synthesis techniques for intellectual property protection

Abstract

Abstract£The economic viability of the reusable core-based design paradigm depends on the development of techniques for intellectual property protection. We introduce the first dynamic watermarking technique for protecting the value of intellectual property of CAD and compilation tools and reusable core components. The essence of the new approach is the addition of a set of design and timing constraints which encodes the author's signature. The constraints are selected in such a way that they result in minimal hardware overhead while embedding the signature which is unique and difficult to detect, remove and forge. We establish the first set of relevant metrics which forms the basis for the quantitative analysis, evaluation, and comparison of watermarking techniques. We develop a generic approach for signature data hiding in designs, which is applicable in conjunction with an arbitrary behavioral synthesis task, such as scheduling, assignment, allocation, and transformations. Error correcting codes are used to augment the protection of the signature data from tampering attempts. On a large set of design examples, studies indicate the effectiveness of the new approach in a sense that the signature data, which are highly resilient, difficult to detect and remove, and yet easy to verify, can be embedded in designs with very low hardware overhead.

Exploring Low Cost Optimal Watermark for Reusable IP Cores During High Level Synthesis

“…Therefore, it is better to use a smaller signature to prevent tampering. So far in the literature only two approaches [2], [3] have been presented that embeds watermarking at the behavioral/architectural level (during one of the high level synthesis steps). However the most recent and popular approach that embeds watermarking at behavioral level is presented in [2].…”

“…Therefore, it is crucial to consider the effect of this area overhead while selecting a watermarked solution. This aforesaid aspect has not been considered in [2] and [3]. Moreover there exists no work that explores a low-cost dynamic watermark based on multi-variable signature during behavioral level.…”

“…In [2] and [3], authors' use only a combination of 0 and 1 to encode their signature in the form of additional edges in the colored interval graph. Since the approach uses combination of two variables, hence it is vulnerable to signature tampering.…”

“…behavioral/architectural level has not been proposed in the above approaches and very limited literature VOLUME 4, 2016 exists in this area. For example, so far watermarking at behavioral level has been implemented in only three works [2], [3], [24].…”

Formal verification of component-based designs

“…There exists a lot of work on issues related to reuse design methodologies [17], such as documentation, quality assurance [24], standardisation, integrity issues [9,20], integration [28,35], etc. The same is true for formal verification techniques such as equivalence checking [15], model checking [12] and theorem proving [30].…”