SIGNED: A Challenge-Response Scheme for Electronic Hardware Watermarking

The emergence of distributed manufacturing ecosystems for electronic hardware involving untrusted parties has led to diverse trust issues. In particular, Intellectual Property (IP) piracy, reverse engineering, and overproduction pose significant threats to integrated circuits (IC) manufacturers. Watermarking has been one of the solutions employed by the semiconductor industry to overcome many of the trust issues. However, existing watermarking techniques often suffer from one or more of the following deficiencies: (1) low structural coverage, (2) applicability to specific design abstraction level (e.g., gate or layout), (3) high design overhead, and (4) vulnerabilities to removal or tampering attacks. We address these deficiencies by introducing a new watermarking scheme, called SIGNED: Signature Insertion through challenGe respoNse in Electronic Design. SIGNED relies on a challenge-response protocol-based interrogation scheme for generating the watermark. It identifies strategic locations of an input design and samples them in response to select input patterns to form a set of compact signatures representing the functional and structural characteristics of a design. We show that this signature set can be used as high-quality watermark of an IP to verify its provenance. We evaluate SIGNED on the ISCAS85, ITC, and MIT CEP benchmark circuits with respect to all major quality parameters of hardware watermark. We show that SIGNED achieves excellent structural coverage and robustness against identification and removal attacks, while introducing modest design overheads.