Publicly Verifiable Watermarking for Intellectual Property Protection in FPGA Design

Abstract

Watermarking as a novel intellectual property (IP) protection technique can protect field-programmable gate array IPs from infringement. However, existing watermarking techniques may give away sensitive information during the public verification, which enables malicious verifiers or third parties to remove the embedded watermark and resell the design. Current zero-knowledge watermarking verification schemes can address the sensitive information leakage issue but are vulnerable to embedding attacks, which makes them ineffective in preventing the infringement denying of untrusted buyers (verifiers). This paper proposes a new publicly verifiable watermarking detection technique based on chaos-based zero-knowledge interaction and time stamping to resiliently resist the sensitive information leakage and embedding attacks, and is thus robust to the cheating from the prover, verifier, or third party. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed method has better robustness than the most recent related literature.