Robust FPGA intellectual property protection through multiple small watermarks

A number of researchers have proposed using digital marks to provide ownership identification for intellectual property. Many of these techniques share three specific weaknesses: complexity of copy detection, vulnerability to mark removal after revelation for ownership verification, and mark integrity issues due to partial mark removal. This paper presents a method for watermarking field programmable gate array (FPGA) intellectual property (IP) that achieves robustness by responding to these three weaknesses. The key technique involves using secure hash functions to generate and embed multiple small marks that are more detectable, verifiable, and secure than existing IP protection techniques