Exploring Handwritten Signature Image Features for Hardware Security

This paper presents a novel hardware security technique that leverages handwritten signature image features for securing intellectual property (IP) cores, such as digital signal processing (DSP) cores, against IP piracy and false claim of IP ownership threats. In our approach, an IP vendor's handwritten signature image features are first converted into a corresponding digital template, followed by mapping into hardware security constraints and implanting them into the design during high level synthesis (HLS) process. This paper presents methodologies of extracting feature set of a handwritten signature through sampling and of encoding of the samples into binary values using a tree based encoding, for generating the digital template. The results of the proposed approach are assessed in terms of strength of IP ownership proof, security against a forged signature and impact of embedding signature constraints on design cost. The results revealed that the proposed approach provides robust security at negligible design cost overhead and also outperforms state of the art hardware security approaches for DSP cores.