HARDWARESOFTWARE IP PROTECTION

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HARDWARE-SOFTWARE IP PROTECTION
Marcello Dalpasso DEI - University of Padova -
Italy Alessandro Bogliolo DI - University of
Ferrara - Italy Luca Benini DEIS - University of
Bologna - Italy
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OUTLINE

• IP protection in EDA
• Motivation
• Existing approaches
• HW-SW co-design issues
• Proposed approach
• Mechanism
• Implementation
• Features
• Conclusions

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IP protection EDA requirements

• System-level integration
• Large design complexity
• HW-SW co-design
• Reduced time to market
• Re-use of hardware software components
• Effective support for re-use of third-party
  designs
• Early design validation (executable description)
• Intellectual property (IP) protection
• IP provider (developer)
• IP user (designer)

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IP protection existing approaches

• Watermarking

Workload
IP

• Encryption

• Virtual simulation

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IP protection HW-SW design
Source code
Binary code
M
I/O
uP
Workload
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IP protection HW-SW challenges

• The algorithm is a Designers IP
• The development tools belong to the Provider
• may contain IP-critical information
• may be commercial products by themselves
• The object code belongs to the Designer
• may contain IP-critical information
• The uP core is a Providers IP

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IP protection HW-SW challenges
IP executable
IP data in
IP data out

• Key issue
• IP-critical executable modules (belonging to the
  Provider) have to operate on IP-critical data
  (belonging to the Designer)
• Designers and Providers IPs cannot be kept on
  separate sites
• Virtual simulation would violate the software to
  protect the hardware

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The proposed approach mechanism
Data in
IP exec
Data out
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The proposed approach implementation
Data in
IP wrapper
RndStrGen
RndStr
IP exec
Cmp
Enable
Encrypt
eRndStr
dRndStr
Data out
AuthClient
designer
seRndStr
dRndStr
provider
AuthServer
AuthServer
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The proposed approach features

• Public key cryptography guarantees protection of
  Providers IP
• No agreement is required on the cipher algorithm
  to use
• The wrapper does not communicate directly with
  the server
• Designers IP is never sent across the Internet
• Designers signature enables authentication,
  accounting and diffusion control
• Java Virtual Machine guarantees safe execution
  and portability

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Conclusions

• IP-based design challenges
• IP protection
• Early design validation
• IP-protection techniques developed for HW designs
  do not apply to HW-SW systems
• The proposed solution
• is based on a client-server architecture
• exploits public-key cryptography for
  authentication and accounting
• exploits Java VM to grant safe execution and
  portability
• http//www.javacad.eu.org/