Low overhead symmetrical protection of reusable IP core using robust fingerprinting and watermarking during high level synthesis

•Proposed approach offers symmetrical protection at less than 1% area overhead.•Proposed approach offers symmetrical protection at less than 1.1% latency overhead.•Our work leverages HLS steps to embed vendor watermark and buyer fingerprint in IP design.

Intellectual Property (IP) core used in computing system-on-chip provides a unique blend of yielding enhanced design productivity with reduced design cycle time. However, leveraging benefits of IP core require protection against threats from both seller's and buyer's perspective. This paper proposes a novel symmetrical IP core protection methodology that embeds a buyer fingerprint and seller watermark simultaneously during high level synthesis (HLS). The proposed work leverages major HLS steps to concurrently embed buyer fingerprint signature and seller watermark signature into a reusable IP core design. The proposed signature encoding for fingerprint and watermark is multi-variable in nature offering strong robustness, low embedding cost and low design overhead. Results on standard benchmarks indicated that the proposed symmetrical approach satisfies all the major protection features of a watermark and fingerprint such as strong robustness to both seller & buyer, low overhead, low runtime and low embedding cost. Further on comparison with baseline design (no protection), the proposed approach offers symmetrical protection (both buyer and seller) at less than 1% area overhead and less than 1.1% latency overhead. Additionally on comparison with a recent unsymmetrical approach, the proposed approach offers symmetrical protection (both buyer and seller) at 0% area overhead and less than 1.1% latency overhead.