Side-Channel based Watermarks for IP Protection

Copyright violations are an increasing problem for hardware designers. Illegal copies of IP cores can cost manufactures millions of dollars. As one possible solution to this problem, digital watermarking for integrated circuits has been proposed in the past. We propose a new watermarking mechanism that is based on side-channels and that can easily and reliably be detected. The idea is to embed a unique signal into a side-channel of the device that serves as a watermark, similar to a side-channel based hardware Trojan. This enables the owner of the watermark to check ICs for their code using the established side-channel. But detecting the illegal use of code in a hardware design is only the first step. With watermarking the owner can also proof towards a third party (e.g a judge) that the code was illegally reused.