Obfuscation as Intellectual Rights Protection in VHDL Language

Abstract

Software is more and more frequently distributed inform of source code. Unprotected code is easy to alter and build in others projects. The answer for attacks against intellectual rights is obfuscation, a process that makes software unintelligible but still functional. In this paper we review several generic techniques of obfuscation VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language) code and present a set of them for software protection. We are going to describe some related experimental work.