Securing IP Cores for DSP Applications Using Structural Obfuscation and Chromosomal DNA Impression

This paper presents a novel hybrid methodology with structural obfuscation and encrypted chromosomal DNA impression to secure intellectual property (IP) cores of digital signal processing (DSP) applications. The proposed work offers security against altering register transfer level (RTL) description using multilevel structural obfuscation as well as security against IP piracy using secret chromosomal DNA impression. In this approach, an invisible DNA impression is covertly implanted into the structurally obfuscated DSP design using robust encoding and encryption using multi-iteration Feistel cipher. Our work is more robust than recent facial biometric and steganography-based hardware IP security techniques, in terms of stronger proof of digital evidence as well as tamper tolerance ability. The results report following qualitative and quantitative analysis of the proposed structural obfuscation with encrypted chromosomal DNA impression based framework: (a) very low probability of coincidence (Pc) (indicating strength of digital evidence) for different DSP IP cores in the range of 7.59E-5 to 1.2E-1; (b) stronger tamper tolerance for different DSP IP cores in the range of 5.62E +14 to 3.40E +38; (c) negligible design cost overhead of 0.00% for different DSP IP cores; (d) strength of obfuscation in terms of number of gates obfuscated.