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Behavioral synthesis techniques for intellectual property protection

Published: 01 July 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce dynamic watermarking techniques for protecting the value of intellectual property of CAD and compilation tools and reusable design components. The essence of the new approach is the addition of a set of design and timing constraints which encodes the author's signature. The constraints are selected in such a way that they result in a minimal hardware overhead while embedding a unique signature that is difficult to remove and forge. Techniques are applicable in conjunction with an arbitrary behavioral synthesis task such as scheduling, assignment, allocation, transformation, and template matching.On a large set of design examples, studies indicate the effectiveness of the new approach that results in signature data that is highly resilient, difficult to detect and remove, and yet is easy to verify and can be embedded in designs with very low hardware overhead. For example, the probability that the same design with the embedded signature is obtained by any other designers by themselves is less than 1 in 10102, and no register overhead was incurred. The probability of tampering, the probability that part of the embedded signature can be removed by random attempts, is shown to be extremely low, and the watermark is additionally protected from such tampering with error-correcting codes.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems  Volume 10, Issue 3
July 2005
156 pages
ISSN:1084-4309
EISSN:1557-7309
DOI:10.1145/1080334
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 July 2005
Published in TODAES Volume 10, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Intellectual property protection
  2. behavioral synthesis
  3. watermarking

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