Watermarking techniques for intellectual property protection

Abstract

Digital system designs are the product of valuable effort and knowhow. Their embodiments, from software and HDL program down to device-level netlist and mask data, represent carefully guarded intellectual property (IP). Hence, design methodologies based on IP reuse require new mechanisms to protect the rights of IP producers and owners. This paper establishes principles of watermarkingbased IP protection, where a watermark is a mechanism for identification that is (i) nearly invisible to human and machine inspection, (ii) difficult to remove, and (iii) permanently embedded as an integral part of the design. We survey related work in cryptography and design methodology, then develop desiderata, metrics and example approaches -centering on constraint-based techniques -for watermarking at various stages of the VLSI design process.

Protecting bus-based hardware IP by secret sharing

“…For many years, the only way designers could assert rights to their IPs (outside the royalty agreement) was to embed watermarks in the ASIC or FPGA design [5,7]. In FPGAs, encrypting the bitstream and exploiting the flexibility of the programmable platform has enabled a number of additional access control primitives [15].…”

Watermarking Techniques for Electronic Circuit Design

“…In [8] fixed placement and delay constraints implemented the watermark. In [9] a sequence of nodes in a multi-level logic function was permuted according to a seeded pseudo-random selection scheme.…”

“…In [10,11] schemes have been proposed to implant watermarks in regular sequential functions by modifying the original function in a structured fashion. In [8], the authors proposed two methods for embedding signatures in a design. The first method, general in nature, can be applied to several abstraction levels.…”

Fair watermarking techniques

“…The generic watermarking-based IPP techniques is proposed in [4], where the entire signature is translated and embedded as extra design constraints. The final implementation satisfies both the initial and extra design specifications.…”

“…Recently, the watermarking-based technique for intellectual property protection (IPP) was proposed [4]. The key observation is that in real life, many CAD problems can be reduced to (often NP-hard) optimization problems where there exist a huge amount of different solutions of the same quality, and this results in different design implementations for the system with the same functionality.…”