Ultra-Low Overhead Dynamic Watermarking on Scan Design for Hard IP Protection

Abstract

Unlike conventional legal means, digital watermark enables an effective self-protection mechanism for VLSI designers to protect their intellectual property (IP). However, existing watermarking techniques come with unpredictable and often high design and performance overhead which makes them impractical. In this paper, we propose an ultra-low overhead watermarking scheme to protect hard IPs, the dominating form of commercial IPs. Our approach is based on the observation that an optimized scan design uses both Q-SD and Q'-SD connections between two adjacent scan cells. Such scan design flexibility in the selection of local connection styles provides a vehicle to embed watermarking constraints. It can be conveniently implemented by local rewiring and/or introducing dummy scan cells. The test vectors will be changed accordingly to reflect the watermarked connection styles in order to guarantee the test coverage. This approach offers two unique features: ultra-low overhead and easy detectability. First, because the scan chain order is maintained and these changes are local, the proposed watermarking technique will introduce ultra-low overhead in terms of area, power and speed. Second, watermark can be extracted from the test vectors and/or the corresponding scan output. Experimental results validate that the performance overhead is negligible (almost zero on most cases) and the watermark is resilient to various possible attacks.

A Blockchain-Based Traceable IP Copyright Protection Algorithm

“…In this section, the design of a mapping function to trace the content of IP circuit trading under the Blockchain environment is discussed, where a circuit can be protected by adding a watermark. As an attacker intends to destroy the content of IP trading, he should attack the watermark in the IP circuit first, given that the copyright requires verification, the traceable mapping function can be used to restore the impaired information [16]- [18]. The mathematical model of quadratic matrix transformation is defined as follows.…”

“…To evaluate the resource overhead and delay, the proposed algorithm is compared to the one proposed by Cui et al [16]. The MD5 IP core is used as the benchmark, respectively representing embedded 100%, 75%, 50% and 25% watermark.…”

Hausdorff Distance Model-Based Identity Authentication for IP Circuits in Service-Centric Internet-of-Things Environment

“…Additionally, the constrained watermarks cannot be detected at another design level, where the low traceability is also a drawback. Cui et al proposed an ultra-low overhead dynamic watermarking on scan design for hard IP protection [30], which has greatly improved the security of the watermarks and reduced the overhead.…”

A robust low-overhead watermarking for field authentication of intellectual property cores

“…These algorithms are classified into two groups: constraints-based watermarking and additive watermarking [33]. Constraints-based watermarking methods in FPGA mainly place extra constraints for configurable logic blocks (CLBs) in odd/even rows [11], restrict the timing of uncritical path [10], exploit the scan chains [9][8] [4] or preserve nets during the procedure of logic synthesis [13]. Other additive methods usually add a signature into the functional IP core.…”