Biblio

The globalization of supply chain makes semiconductor chips susceptible to various security threats. Design obfuscation techniques have been widely investigated to thwart intellectual property (IP) piracy attacks. Key distribution among IP providers, system integration team, and end users remains as a challenging problem. This work proposes an orthogonal obfuscation method, which utilizes an orthogonal matrix to authenticate obfuscation keys, rather than directly examining each activation key. The proposed method hides the keys by using an orthogonal obfuscation algorithm to increasing the key retrieval time, such that the primary keys for IP cores will not be leaked. The simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the key retrieval time by 36.3% over the baseline. The proposed obfuscation methods have been successfully applied to ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits. Experimental results indicate that the orthogonal obfuscation only increases the area by 3.4% and consumes 4.7% more power than the baseline1.

A digital watermarking technique is an alternative method to protect the intellectual property of digital images. This paper presents a hybrid blind watermarking technique formulated by combining RDWT with SVD considering a trade-off between imperceptibility and robustness. Watermark embedding locations are determined using a modified entropy of the host image. Watermark embedding is employed by examining the orthogonal matrix U obtained from the hybrid scheme RDWT-SVD. In the proposed scheme, the watermark image in binary format is scrambled by Arnold chaotic map to provide extra security. Our scheme is tested under different types of signal processing and geometrical attacks. The test results demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides higher robustness and less distortion than other existing schemes in withstanding JPEG2000 compression, cropping, scaling and other noises.