High Level Synthesis based Forensic Watermarking of Hardware IPs

The threats of hardware intellectual property (IP) piracy and fraud IP ownership claim pose a grave concern for the hardware security community. This presentation will propose a novel high-level synthesis (HLS) methodology that exploits IP vendor's deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) signature to form a forensic hardware watermark for covertly embedding into allocation phase of the design synthesis process. The talk will discuss how forensic watermark signature is generated by extracting unique DNA components such as microsatellites and fragments. The proposed presentation will also compare with the existing HLS watermarking techniques, highlighting enhancements obtained in terms of security parameter such as probability of coincidence and tamper tolerance.