Securing Reusable Hardware IP cores using Palmprint Biometric

This paper presents a novel contact-less palmprint biometric based approach for securing reusable hardware IP cores against piracy threat. As the modern integrated circuits (ICs) supply chain involves third party vendors to meet the market demand, an unauthorized intellectual property (IP) vendor may counterfeit the hardware IPs and infuse them into the design. Thus, fake IPs or ICs may unknowingly or deliberately be assimilated into consumer electronics (CE) systems, leading to reliability and safety concerns for end consumers. In the proposed approach, the authentic palmprint biometric is first converted into its equivalent palmprint signature digital template based on a selected feature set. Subsequently, embedding of the palmprint signature’s digital template in the form of secret biometric constraints into the design is performed to distinguish between counterfeited and authentic IP core(s). The proposed approach presents a non-replicable and non-vulnerable solution achieving stronger security in terms of temper tolerance (TT) and probability of coincidence (Pc) than the state of the art techniques.