Crypto-Genome Signature for Securing Hardware Accelerators

This paper presents a new crypto-Genome signature-based security methodology to secure hardware accelerators against IP piracy and ownership threats. In the proposed approach, an IP vendor selected Genome sequence is formulated using two different types of base pair/order of Genome chemical elements: Guanine (G), Thymine (T), Adenine (A), Cytosine (C) and polynucleotide (S), followed by robust encryption using unified Feistel cipher process and encodings. This IP vendor’s crypto-Genome signature is then subsequently transformed into its corresponding digital template, followed by embedding into the design as covert crypto-genome signature security constraints; thus, enabling the security of hardware accelerator design. The proposed methodology renders robust security than recent hardware steganography and facial biometric based hardware security approaches proposed in the literature on the grounds of definite proof of ownership (authorship) and tamper tolerance ability. The proposed crypto-Genome signature approach offers: (a) lesser value of probability of coincidence (Pc) metric (signifying strength of digital proof) ranging from 7.52E-4 to 9.00E-14; (b) robust tamper tolerance ability (TT) of DSP hardware accelerators ranging from 3.3E+7 to 5.39E+67.