IP Core Steganography for Protecting DSP Kernels Used in CE Systems

Intellectual Property (IP) core protection of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) kernels is an important subject of research for Consumer Electronics (CE) systems. An IP core may be prone to piracy, forgery and counterfeiting. The need of the hour is developing effective technique that is robust and incurs low overhead to detect IP core infringement. This paper presents a novel `IP core steganography' methodology for DSP kernels that is capable of detecting IP piracy. The proposed methodology is capable of implanting concealed information into the existing IP core design of DSP datapath without using any external signature, to reflect the IP core ownership. The presented `IP core steganography' methodology is non-intuitive in nature indicating that the intended secret information does not attract attention to itself from an adversary's perspective. The implanted information incurs almost no design overhead and yields lower design cost than signature-based IP core protection techniques. Further, in the presented approach the amount of concealed information embedded is fully designer controlled through a `thresholding' parameter, unlike signature-based techniques where signature pattern impacts the robustness and overhead. Results of proposed approach yielded lower cost and stronger proof of authorship compared to a signature-based approach.