Hardware Trojans Inspired IP Watermarks

Hardware watermarking (HW) is supposed to protect the authenticity of HW intellectual properties (IPs) but face the dual challenge of high overhead and ease of removal. HW Trojans are designed to overcome those same challenges for a very different purpose. In this article, the authors propose an ingenious watermarking methodology inspired by HW Trojans for efficiently and effectively protecting the authenticity of HW IPs.