A Leakage-Resilient FPGA-Based IP Identity Authentication Protocol

Abstract

Protection of IPs through watermarking techniques is prevalent to prevent IP infringement. In previous researches, authentication of watermark in IPs easily disclosures sensitive information of real embedded watermarks, where the evidence of identifying IP ownership may be attacked by illegal verifiers. Despite several watermark detection techniques can address the disclosure of sensitive information in detection procedure, the efficiency for such a detection remains relatively low. Besides, it may yield to large communication overhead on multiple authentication rounds. Motivated by the needs of robustness and efficiency, it is proposed in this work a leakage-resilient protocol to authenticate ownership of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) bitfile design using zero-knowledge proof. The prover can convince the verifier that he knows a secret in the suspected bitfile design via only one interaction. Real locations of watermarks are concealed through location anonymity. With the received authentication package from the prover, the verifier cannot obtain other useful information about watermarks. From experiments, we show that the proposed authentication technique achieves high efficiency and robustness on watermark detection.