An FPGA Intellectual Property Authentication Scheme through Watermarking Techniques

This paper presents an intellectual property (IP) protection authentication scheme for field programmable gate array (FPGA) with embedded watermark. The use of digital watermarks to provide ownership (watermarking) and recipient (fingerprinting) identification for IP has become widespread. However, it could not prevent the unauthorized reuses when a person resells the watermarked FPGA design with signature to others. The authentication process in the proposed scheme is based on creating a watermark by encrypting the unique FPGA board ID with the signature of the original IP creator, which guarantees that a watermarked FPGA design can only be used on an authorized FPGA board. In addition, two feasible implementations of the proposed IP authentication scheme are presented. Key-Words: Security, Intellectual Property, FPGA, Watermarking, Authentication 1 Corresponding author. Professor of Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, Canada. E-mail: [email protected].