Intellectual Property Protection for Integrated Systems Using Soft Physical Hash Functions

Intellectual property right violations are an important problem for integrated system designers. We propose a new solution for mitigating such violations, denoted as soft physical hash functions. It combines previously introduced ideas of soft hash functions (in the field of image processing) and side-channel leakage (in the field of cryptographic hardware). For this purpose, we first introduce and formalize the components of an intellectual property detection infrastructure using soft physical hash functions. Next, we discuss its advantages over previous proposals aiming at similar goals. The most important point here is that the proposed technique can be applied to already deployed products. Finally, we validate our approach with a first experimental study.