A Unified Methodology for Hardware Obfuscation and IP Watermarking

Hardware security is a matter of increasing importance in the modern world. With increasing threats of piracy and theft, it is needed to devise methodologies to mitigate these concerns. Obfuscating the design netlist is a popular method to achieve this to a significant extent. However, full security guarantee is not provided with the encryption approach. Under this scenario, a watermarking method complements the security guarantee by providing claims of IP authorship. In this paper, we present a unified methodology for circuit encryption and watermarking to enhance hardware security. Experiments on several ISCAS’85 benchmark circuits show that the proposed methodology has average 8.2% area overhead and 11.3% power overhead.