Secure Optimized Hardware IP Design using Key-driven Hash Slicing based HLS Watermarking Integrated with Krill-Herd DSE

Abstract

The problems of intellectual property (IP) piracy and false IP ownership have emerged as a significant concern for the hardware security community. This paper presents a novel low-cost high level synthesis (HLS) watermarking framework using key-driven hash slicing algorithm and krill-herd based design space exploration (KH-DSE) to provide detective countermeasure against IP piracy and false IP ownership claim. The proposed algorithm comprises of several security parameters, such as the design secret information generation, SHA-512, encoded slice formation and selection, and data chunk extraction, along with watermark constraints generation and embedding rules for embedding covert watermarking constraints. The results of the proposed approach, on comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, indicated enhancement in security in terms of probability of coincidence and tamper tolerance, at negligible design cost overhead. © 2025 IEEE.