Watermarking graph partitioning solutions

Trends in the semiconductor industry towards extensive design and code reuse motivate a need for adequate intellectual property protection (IPP) schemes. We offer a new general IPP scheme called constraint-based watermarking and analyze it in the context of the graph partitioning problem. Graph partitioning is a critical optimization problem that has many applications, particularly in the semiconductor design process. Our IPP technique for graph partitioning watermarks solutions to graph partitioning problems so that they carry an author's signature. Our technique is transparent to the actual CAD tool which does the partitioning. Our technique produces solutions that have very low quality degradation levels, yet carry signatures that are convincingly unambiguous, extremely unlikely to be present by coincidence, and difficult to detect or remove without completely resolving the partitioning problem.