New advances for automated IP soft-core watermarking

摘要

Significant improvements have been achieved for Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) of IP cores at HDL level bymeans of our proposed watermarking techniques from the initial solution. The basic idea relies on spreading the bits of adigital signature at the HDL design level using combinational logic or look-up structures included within the originalsystem. The techniques also include a secure and non-destructive signature extraction process. Recently, applicabilityhas been extended due to the development of an automated tool for signature spreading purposes. Last advances refer tothe development of new algorithms for the automated tool that result in important improvements and automaticgeneration of the VHDL code to add to the original core for signature extraction purposes. In addition, the mostimportant 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.