HLS Based Hardware Watermarking Using IP Seller's Superimposed Facial Anthropometric Features

Abstract

Ensuring the security of hardware intellectual property (IP) designs is crucial for IP sellers/vendors due to the exposure of the global design chain process to security risks like IP piracy and false IP ownership claim. A potential threat within system-on-chip (SoC) or foundry house may involve piracy or fraudulent claim of ownership rights by an attacker. Therefore, ensuring the security of IP designs is paramount from an IP seller's perspective. This paper presents a novel high level synthesis (HLS) based hardware watermarking by exploiting IP seller's superimposed facial anthropometric features as imperceptible embedded watermark. The watermark is embedded into the hardware IP design during HLS as covert security constraints which serves as digital evidence against external threats. The proposed approach offers enhanced security (i.e., stronger tamper tolerance and lower probability of coincidence) compared to prior works at negligible design cost overhead. © 2024 IEEE.