Effective Iterative Techniques for Fingerprinting Design IP

While previous watermarking-based approaches to intellectual property protection (IPP) have asymmetrically emphasized the IP provider's rights, the true goal of IPP is to ensure the rights of both the IP provider and the IP buyer. Symmetric fingerprinting schemes have been widely and effectively used to achieve this goal; however, their application domain has been restricted only to static artifacts, such as image and audio. In this paper, we propose the first generic symmetric fingerprinting technique which can be applied to an arbitrary optimization/synthesis problem and, therefore, to hardware and software intellectual property. The key idea is to apply iterative optimization in an incremental fashion to solve a fingerprinted instance; this leverages the optimization effort already spent in obtaining a previous solution, yet generates a uniquely fingerprinted new solution. We use this approach as the basis for developing specific fingerprinting techniques for four important pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Andrew E. Caldwell, Hyun-Jin Choi, Andrew B. Kahng, Stefanus Mantik, Miodrag Potkonjak, Gang Qu, Jennifer L. Wong
• Keywords: DAC 1999, Design Automation, Generic Symmetric Fingerprinting, Specific Fingerprinting Techniques, Symmetric Fingerprinting Schemes