Obfuscation in DSP algorithms using high level transformations for hardware protection

This paper presents a method to protect digital signal processing (DSP) circuits through obfuscation by using high-level transformations. The goal is to design DSP circuits that are harder to reverse engineer. A design flow is introduced to get obfuscated circuits for digital signal processing (DSP) applications using high-level transformations. A secure reconfigurable switch design is incorporated into the proposed design scheme to improve the security. Several modes of operations are introduced for obfuscation where the outputs are meaningful from a signal processing point of view, but are functionally incorrect. Structural obfuscation is achieved by the proposed methodology via folding, a high-level transformation. Pipelining and register minimization techniques along with folding can be used to reduce the overheads in the design.