Digital Rights Management for Paper-Based Microfluidic Biochips

Paper-based digital microfluidic biochips (PB-DMFBs) provide a promising solution for microfluidic bioassays. Due to the low-cost substrate material and low demand for complicated manufacturing equipment, PB-DMFBs can be fabricated without foundry. On the flip side, convenience of fabrication allows PB-DMFBs to be fabricated everywhere, which makes it is difficult to manage production and distribution of IP (bioassays). As a result, PB-DMFBs are vulnerable to security threats. IP and its creator, the biocoders, may suffer from infringement. To ensure IP protection, in this paper, we proposed the first Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme to protect IPs of PB-DMFBs from security threats. A chip-level synthesis algorithm is also presented to realize not only complex biochemical operations but also the demand of DRM.