Leveraging Architectural Obfuscation and Encoded Palmprint-Hash for Securing Hardware IP Designs used in CE Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel intellectual property (IP) protection methodology to design secure hardware IP designs used in consumer electronics (CE) systems. The proposed methodology ensures security against an adversary attempting to reverse engineer (RE) an IP design as well as attempting to perform IP piracy. The proposed approach employs partitioning driven architectural (structural) obfuscation and fused hardware IP watermarking technique (based on integrated palmprint-hashing) to secure an IP design robustly. The proposed approach firstly generates structurally obfuscated IP design, which is capable of hindering RE attack. Next, the fused watermark is generated based on IP vendor palmprint biometric features and encoded hash signature. Thereafter, generated fused watermark is selected based on coded distribution for embedding into each partition (as digital evidence), capable of enabling robust detection of pirated IPs (before integration into system of chip). The proposed security methodology achieves stronger digital evidence (indicated by lower probability of coincidence) and higher tamper tolerance, compared to several prior works, at minimal design cost overhead. The proposed approach also achieves robust obfuscation. © 2013 IEEE.