Securing Reusable IP Cores Using Voice Biometric Based Watermark

Reusable third-party intellectual property (3PIP) cores within the supply chain are vulnerable to hardware threats such as IP piracy and false claim of ownership. Securing the reusable IP cores is vital to protect the original vendor from a substantial revenue loss and his/her brand value. This paper presents a novel hardware IP core watermarking methodology based on voice biometric signature to enable detective control against IP piracy and resolve IP ownership claim. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first voice biometric-based hardware IP protection technique. This paper proposes a novel methodology for generating a unique voice signature template using distinct voice features, viz. jitter and shimmer, along with pitch and intensity values at different timestamps. We present a high-level synthesis (HLS) design methodology of embedding a voice signature digital template during the register allocation phase to generate secured IP cores. Results and analysis imply that the proposed approach can significantly improve security in terms of stronger authorship proof and higher tamper tolerance compared to the existing IP watermarking approaches. Additionally, we also analyze the uniqueness of a voice signature and its security against forgery attack. We achieve higher security at negligible design cost overhead.