Electrical & Computer Engineering Research Works

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1658

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Subject: search.filters.subject.watermarking

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Fingerprinting Intellectual Property Using Constraint-Addition
    (IEEE, 2000-06) Qu, Gang; Potkonjak, Miodrag
    Recently, intellectual property protection (IPP) techniques attracted a great deal of attention from semiconductor, system integration and software companies. A number of watermarking-based techniques have been proposed for IPP. One of the key limitations of watermarking is that it does not facilitate tracing of illegally resold intellectual property (IP). Fingerprinting resolves this problem by providing each customer with a unique instance of functionally identical IP. We propose a general technique which enables fingerprinting at all level of design process and is applicable to an arbitrary optimization step. In particular, we address the following fingerprinting problem: How to generate a large number of high quality solution for a given optimization problem by solving the initial problem only once. In addition we also discuss how to select a subset of k solutions from the pool of n solutions so that the solutions are maximally different. In order to make our discussion concrete we focus on a single NP-complete problem - graph coloring. We test the new fingerprinting on a number of standard benchmarks. Interestingly, while on random graphs it is relatively difficult to produce a large number of solutions without nontrivial quality degradation, on all real-life compilation graphs we are able to generate millions of solution which are all optimal.
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    Fair Watermarking Techniques
    (IEEE, 2000-01) Qu, Gang; Wong, Jennifer L.; Potkonjak, Miodrag
    Many intellectual property protection (IPP) techniques have been proposed. Their primary objectives are providing convincible proof of authorship with least degradation of the quality of the intellectual property (IP), and achieving robustness against attacks. These are also well accepted as the most important criteria to evaluate different IPP techniques. The essence of such techniques is to limit the solution space by embedding signatures as constraints. One key issue that should be addressed but has not been discussed is the fairness of the techniques: what is the quality of the solution subspace for different signatures, that is, how large the solution subspace is (uniqueness), and how difficulty it is to get a solution from such subspace (hardness)? In this paper, we introduce fairness as one of the metrics for good IPP techniques and post the challenge problem of how to design fair watermarking techniques. We claim that all fair techniques have to be instanceoriented and due to the complexity of the problem itself, we propose an approach that utilizes the statistical information of the problem instance. We use the satisfiability (SAT) problem as an example to illustrate how fairness could be achieved. We make the observation that the unfairness of the previous watermarking techniques comes from the global embedding of the signature and propose fair watermarking techniques. We test the uniqueness and hardness on a model with full knowledge of the solution and real life benchmarks as well. The experimental results show fairness can be achieved.
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    Publicly Detectable Techniques for the Protection of Virtual Components
    (IEEE, 2001-06) Qu, Gang
    Highlighted with the newly released intellectual property (IP) protection white paper by VSI Alliance, the protection of virtual components (VCs) has received a large amount of attention recently. Digital signature is one of the most promising solutions among the known protection mechanisms. However, the trade-off between hard-to-attack and easy-to-detect and the lack of efficient detection schemes are the major obstacles for digital signatures to thrive. In this paper, we propose a new watermarking method which (i) allows the watermark to be public detected without forensic experts, (ii) gives little advantage to attackers for forgery, and (iii) does not lose the strength of protection provided by other watermarking techniques. The basic idea is to make part of the watermark public. We explain the concept of this public-private watermark and discuss the generation and embedding of such marks. We use popular VLSI CAD problems, namely technology mapping, partitioning, graph coloring, FPGA design, and Boolean satisfiability, to demonstrate its easy detectability, high credibility, low design overhead, and robustness. Finally, this technique is compatible with all the known watermarking and fingerprinting techniques.
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    Effective Iterative Techniques for Fingerprinting Design IP
    (IEEE, 1999-06) Caldwell, Andrew E.; Choi, Hyun-Jin; Kahng, Andrew B.; Mantik, Stefanus; Potkonjak, Miodrag; Qu, Gang; Wong, Jennifer L.
    While previous watermarking-based approaches to intellectual property protection (IPP) have asymmetrically emphasized the IP provider’s rights, the true goal of IPP is to ensure the rights of both the IP provider and the IP buyer. Symmetric fingerprinting schemes have been widely and effectively used to achieve this goal; however, their application domain has been restricted only to static artifacts, such as image and audio. In this paper, we propose the first generic symmetric fingerprinting technique which can be applied to an arbitrary optimization/synthesis problem and, therefore, to hardware and software intellectual property. The key idea is to apply iterative optimization in an incremental fashion to solve a fingerprinted instance; this leverages the optimization effort already spent in obtaining a previous solution, yet generates a uniquely fingerprinted new solution. We use this approach as the basis for developing specific fingerprinting techniques for four important problems in VLSI CAD: partitioning, graph coloring, satisfiability, and standard-cell placement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our fingerprinting techniques on a number of standard benchmarks for these tasks. Our approach provides an effective tradeoff between runtime and resilience against collusion.
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    Analysis of Watermarking Techniques for Graph Coloring Problem
    (IEEE, 1998-11) Qu, Gang; Pokonjak, Miodrag;
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    Publicly Detectable Watermarking for Intellectual Property Authentication in VLSI Design
    (IEEE, 2002-11) Qu, Gang
    Highlighted with the newly released intellectual property (IP) protection white paper by VSI Alliance, the protection of virtual components or IPs in very large scale integration (VLSI) design has received a great deal of attention recently. Digital signature/watermark is one of the most promising solutions among the known protection mechanisms. It provides desirable proof of authorship without rendering the IP useless. However, it makes the watermark detection, which is as important as watermarking, an NP-hard problem. In fact, the tradeoff between hard-to-attack and easy-to-detect and the lack of efficient detection schemes are the major obstacles for digital signatures to thrive. In this paper, the authors propose a new watermarking method which allows the watermark to be publicly detected without losing its strength and security. The basic idea is to create a cryptographically strong pseudo-random watermark, embed it into the original problem as a special (which the authors call mutual exclusive) constraint, and make it public. The authors combine data integrity technique and the unique characteristics in the design of VLSI IPs such that adversaries will not gain any advantage from the public watermarking for forgery. This new technique is compatible with the existing constraint-based watermarking/fingerprinting techniques. The resulting public–private watermark maintains the strength of a watermark and provides easy detectability with little design overhead. The authors build the mathematical framework for this approach based on the concept of mutual exclusive constraints. They use popular VLSI CAD problems, namely technology mapping, partitioning, graph coloring, FPGA design, and Boolean satisfiability, to demonstrate the public watermark’s easy detectability, high credibility, low design overhead, and robustness.