High-Level Synthesis-Based Forensic Watermarking of Hardware IPs Using IP Vendor’s DNA Signature

The threats of hardware intellectual property (IP) piracy and fraud IP ownership claim pose a grave concern for the hardware security community. This paper proposes a novel high-level synthesis (HLS) methodology that exploits IP vendor’s deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) signature to form a forensic hardware watermark for covertly embedding into allocation phase of the design synthesis process. The forensic watermark signature is generated by extracting unique DNA components such as microsatellites and fragments. The proposed approach, when compared with the existing HLS watermarking techniques, revealed enhancement in security in terms of probability of coincidence and tamper tolerance, at nominal design overhead.