GEM-Water: Generation of EM-based Watermark with Hidden FSM for SoC IPs to Combat Piracy

Leveraging the intellectual property (IP) core is a widely adopted strategy to expedite the development of new products within modern System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. In today’s competitive market, reusing and sharing IP cores can significantly shorten the time-to-market for SoC designs. However, this practice also introduces security problems, such as IP piracy and overuse. Watermarking is one of the most popular methods to combat IP counterfeiting. Nevertheless, the current state-of-the-art watermarking approaches often overlook the threat posed by rogue SoC design houses and frequently require physical access to the target IP in the SoC for watermark authentication. To address these issues, this paper proposes GEM-Water, an effective IP/SoC-agnostic watermark verification mechanism that utilizes the electromagnetic (EM) radiation emitted by an IP within a packaged SoC to verify the watermark during SoC boot-up. Based on secret authorship information, the functional Finite State Machine (FSM) of the target IP is modified and subsequently translated into an EM signature. This signature can later be extracted using a near-field EM probe during SoC boot-up. With the assistance of such EM side-channel analysis, GEM-Water can authenticate the watermark without the need for physical access to the target IP itself. To validate the robustness and viability of GEM-Water, experiments were conducted on various AMD Xilinx 7 series and Microsemi FPGAs, demonstrating watermark detection accuracy consistently exceeding 95% across different benchmarks.