An FSM-based IP protection technique using added watermarked states

• Published in: 2013 International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Communications (ATC 2013) pp. 718 - 723
• Main Authors: Kim-Hung Nguyen, Trong-Thuc Hoang, Trong-Tu Bui
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2013
• Subjects: Algorithm design and analysis; Cities and towns; Digital signal processing; IP networks; Signal processing algorithms; System-on-chip; Watermarking
• ISBN: 1479910864; 9781479910861
• ISSN: 2162-1020; 2162-1039
• DOI: 10.1109/ATC.2013.6698210

Nowadays, IP watermarking becomes the state-of-the-art technique in the field of IP protection. This technique aims at implanting a message such as a signature into the structure without changing the original functionality. One of the mainstreams of IP watermarking research is the Finite State Machines (FSM) watermarking. In this paper, we propose two FSM watermarking techniques which embed a signature of the IP creators in the state-transition-graph (STG) by adding new states, so-called watermarked states (WS). They are Front-added Watermarked States (FAWS) and Back-added Watermarked States (BAWS). Two FSM cores, i.e. simple CPU and UART transmission, are built and watermarked successfully in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. Experimental results show that the FAWS method has the average cell and area overhead is 14.25% and 6.47%, respectively. Likewise, the increasing of cell and area of the BAWS method is 15.63% and 8.16%, respectively.