Structural obfuscation of DSP cores used in CE devices

Abstract

Previous chapters, watermarking, fingerprinting, and forensic engineering have been discussed for resolving various ownership-related problems. This chapter discusses structural obfuscation approaches to thwart IP piracy and reverse engineering (RE). This approach, when effective, can save billions of dollars of revenue losses in CE and semiconductor industry. Especially, a multi-high-level transformation-based structural obfuscation process has been presented for DSP IP cores as hardware-hardening technique. The chapter is structured as follows: Section 7.2 highlights the fundamentals of obfuscation with stress on structural obfuscation; Section 7.3 discusses different compiler transformation-driven structural obfuscation methodology. Section 7.4 discusses low-cost structurally obfuscated design exploring technique. Section 7.5 demonstrates a multistage structural obfuscation technique through a motivational example. Section 7.6 presents the results of a case study.