Hardware Security of Digital Image Filter IP Cores against Piracy using IP Seller’s Fingerprint Encrypted Amino Acid Biometric Sample

Security of important hardware accelerators such as digital image filter IP cores has become a primary concern owing to its wide applicability in modern consumer electronics systems/multimedia systems such as digital camera systems, smartphones, tablets, etc. They perform crucial data and computation-intensive operations such as image edge detection, image sharpening, image blurring, etc. Therefore, it is imperative to consider the security of these digital image filter IP cores to protect them from false claim of IP ownership and IP piracy threats. This paper presents a novel robust hardware security methodology using IP seller’s fingerprint encrypted amino acid biometric sample. The proposed approach offers the following novelties: (a) signature generation process using novel amino acid based biometric sample and (b) generation of fingerprint biometric encrypted amino acid signature using advanced encryption standard (AES)-128 mechanism c) higher and more robust security (lower false positive or probability of coincidence and higher tamper tolerance) than the recent approaches because of the generation of more security constraints and the involvement of two different models of biometrics. The proposed approach incurs 0% design cost overhead post-signature implantation with an average reduction of ~82.44 % in probability of coincidence.