Crypto based Multi-Variable Fingerprinting for Protecting DSP cores

In the design process of Consumer Electronics (CE) systems, there are several security challenges for a vendor or a buyer to ensure IP rights protection. This paper proposes a novel crypto framework based IP core protection methodology for DSP kernels that embeds a buyer fingerprint into a design during high level synthesis (HLS). The proposed signature encoding for fingerprint is multi-variable in nature offering stronger robustness, low embedding cost and low design overhead. It also makes use of a secure hashing technique to derive the fingerprint signature which provides an added level of security against counterfeiting. Upon testing on standard DSP benchmarks, it was found that the proposed approach satisfies all the major protection features of a fingerprint such as strong robustness to the buyer, low overhead, low run time and low embedding cost. Further with respect to the baseline design (with no fingerprint), the proposed approach offers robustness at 0% design cost overhead. Additionally on comparison with a related work, the proposed approach offers a lesser design cost and lesser area overhead without compromising robustness.