ActiWate: Adaptive and Design-agnostic Active Watermarking for IP Ownership in Modern SoCs
Zahin Ibnat, M. Sazadur Rahman, Mridha Md Mashahedur Rahman, Hadi Mardani Kamali, Mark Mohammad Tehranipoor, Farimah Farahmandi · 2023
Watermarking offers a viable solution to combat IP piracy and illegal re-use. However, watermarking verification techniques rely heavily on manual testing by verification engineers and ignore the possibility of having a rogue SoC design house. To automate the watermarking-based verification process and to be against wider attacks (e.g., rogue design house), this paper presents ActiWate, which conducts automatic self-verification by communicating with various peripherals within the SoC. Showing its resilience against removal and spoofing attacks, ActiWate is architectured to be an IP/SoC-agnostic watermarking and our experiments demonstrate its versatility by implementing it on multiple RISC-V SoCs with different components/peripherals.