Fingerprinting intellectual property using constraint-addition

Recently, intellectual property protection (IPP) techniques attracted a great deal of attention from semiconductor, system integration and software companies. A number of watermarking-based techniques have been proposed for IPP. One of the key limitations of watermarking is that it does not facilitate tracing of illegally resold intellectual property (IP). Fingerprinting resolves this problem by providing each customer with a unique instance of functionally identical IP. We propose a general technique which enables fingerprinting at all level of design process and is applicable to an arbitrary optimization step. In particular, we address the following fingerprinting problem: How to generate a large number of high quality solution for a given optimization problem by solving the initial problem only once. In addition we also discuss how to select a subset of k solutions from the pool of n solutions so that the solutions are maximally different. In order to make our discussion concrete w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Gang Qu, Miodrag Potkonjak
• Keywords: DAC 2000, Design Automation, Nontrivial Quality Degradation, Optimization Problem, Single Np-complete Problem