Gen-Sign: HLS Based Watermarking Using IP Vendor's Feistel Cipher Encrypted Genomic Signature for Protecting CNN and Image Processing Filter Cores Against Piracy

Abstract

This paper presents a novel hardware intellectual property (IP) watermarking process during high level synthesis (HLS) that leverages IP vendor human body sample in the form of genomic sequence to act as secret invisible encrypted signature (called 'Gen-Sign'), The proposed encrypted genomic signature is used as an imperceptible watermark to secure convolutional neural network (CNN) and image processing filter against IP piracy. The presented approach has been evaluated on benchmarks in terms of design cost overhead, probability of coincidence, tamper tolerance and entropy. Results of the proposed approach indicate superior security at 0% design overhead, compared to prior approaches. © 2024 IEEE.