New advances for automated IP soft-core watermarking
Encarnación Castillo, Uwe H. Meyer-Baese, Luis Parrilla, Antonio García, A. Lloris · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2009
Significant improvements have been achieved for Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) of IP cores at HDL level by means of our proposed watermarking techniques from the initial solution. The basic idea relies on spreading the bits of a digital signature at the HDL design level using combinational logic or look-up structures included within the original system. The techniques also include a secure and non-destructive signature extraction process. Recently, applicability has been extended due to the development of an automated tool for signature spreading purposes. Last advances refer to the development of new algorithms for the automated tool that result in important improvements and automatic generation of the VHDL code to add to the original core for signature extraction purposes. In addition, the most important metrics for watermarking techniques, such as the impact over the original core and the strength against attacks, allow the evaluation of the watermarking technique and illustrate the effectiveness of the proposal.