Soft IP Protection: Watermarking HDL Codes

Abstract

Abstract. Intellectual property (IP) reuse based design is one of the most promising techniques to close the so-called design productivity gap. To facilitate better IP reuse, it is desirable to have IPs exchanged in the soft form such as hardware description language (HDL) source codes. However, soft IPs have higher protection requirements than hard IPs and most existing IP protection techniques are not applicable to soft IPs. In this paper, we describe the basic requirements, make the necessary assumptions, and propose several practical schemes for HDL code protection. We protect the HDL codes by hiding author's signature also called as watermarking, similar to the idea for hard IP and multimedia data protection. But the new challenge is how to embed watermark into HDL source codes, which must be properly documented and synthesizable for reuse. We leverage the unique feature of Verilog HDL design to develop several watermarking techniques. These techniques can protect both new and existing Verilog designs. We watermark SCU-RTL & ISCAS benchmark Verilog circuits, as well as a MP3 decoder. Both original and watermarked designs are implemented on ASICs & FPGAs. The results show that the proposed techniques survive the commercial synthesis tools and cause little design overhead in terms of area/resources, delay and power.

Resilient Rights Protection for Product Data

“…Based on the digital signature technology, Fomaro proposed a private Key Watermarking algorithm for authentication of CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) [13]. While more recent research has extended to some new digital domains, such as relational data [14][15], software [16][17], natural language [18][19], categorical data [24], sensor streams [21] and so on.…”

Data Hiding in Compiled Program Binaries for Enhancing Computer System Performance

“…It uses the run-time trace of a program and a particular program input (the secret key) to carry hidden information. An analogous approach was proposed to watermark HDL code for ASIC and FPGA design [16]. All these schemes aim at preventing software piracy, where hostile adversaries have strong incentives to remove the embedded watermark.…”

A new watermarking method for soft IP protection

“…The watermark is robust but hard to detect with the former methods, while easy to detect but crack at low cost in the latter ones. Lin Yuan et al proposed several soft IP protection methods [2] by watermarking HDL source code including module watermarking, modules duplication, and module splitting, but these method's implementation cost is too high. E.Castillo et al presented a soft IP protection technique [3] by digital signature within memory structures or combinational logic in the system design with low cost overhead to the system and easy detectability.…”

“…Soft IP cores are delivered in the form of synthesizable HDL codes. The flexibility makes soft IP cores hard to trace and therefore difficult to prevent IP infringements [2]. Digital watermarking is a technology used to identify the ownership of soft IPs.…”

“…In general, the current watermarking approaches for soft IP protection can be classified into two categories [2][3][4][5][6]: structure-changes-based [2][3][4] and additional-circuit-based [5][6]. The watermark is robust but hard to detect with the former methods, while easy to detect but crack at low cost in the latter ones.…”