A Fault-Tolerant Watermarking Algorithm for FPGA IP Protection

Abstract

Intellectual Property (IP) is difficult to identify when the watermarks are impaired in previous work. To address this issue, we propose a fault-tolerant watermarking scheme for FPGA IP design. The scheme employs Blakley threshold method for signature sharing. The watermarks are then encoded with Reed-Solomon (RS) coding and finally embedded into unused LUTs of used slice. The signature sharing makes it unnecessary to extract all embedded watermarks in authentication. The complete signature can be retrieved with several watermarks even if other watermarks are damaged. The experiments show that the fault-tolerant scheme incurs no extra resource and timing overhead and has good robustness against removal attacks.