RF authenticated protection scheme for SRAM-based FPGA IP cores

Abstract

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have become increasingly popular due to their rapid development times and low costs. Many FPGA-based systems utilise third-party intellectual property (IP) in their development. With their increased use, the need to protect the IP against unauthorised use has become important. In this paper, we have proposed a novel wireless intellectual property protection (IPP) technique that overcomes the secure secret decryption key storage problem associated with traditional encryption-based IPP techniques that are widely used for IPP of static random access memory-based FPGA IP cores. The proposed scheme also provides an extra authentication protection for IP cores to make it more security efficient. The results derived from the testing of hardware prototype used for the evaluation of the proposed scheme are quite encouraging.