Intellectual Property Protection of HDL IP Cores Through Automated Signature Hosting

This paper presents significant improvements to our previous watermarking technique for Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) that enables the protection of IP cores. The technique relies on hosting the bits of a digital signature at the HDL design level using combinational logic included within the original system. Thus, any attack trying to change or remove the digital signature will damage the design. The technique also includes a procedure for secure signature extraction. The new advances refer to increasing the applicability of this watermarking technique to any design and the provision of an automatic tool for signature hosting purposes. The design examples on FPL devices show the effectiveness of this watermarking technique. Synthesis results show that the application of the proposed watermarking strategy results in negligible degradation of system performance and very low area penalties.