R ecent advances in digital communications and storage technologies have brought major changes for consumers. Magnetic and optical storage capacity, for example, is much higher today than it was a few years ago. Today’s basic personal computer system has 40 Gbytes of magnetic hard disk storage, and, although a DVD (digital versatile disk) is the same physical size as a CD, it’s faster and can s...

hough Holmes was not writing for a digital age and certainly not for an era of digital rights management (DRM), his remarks may hold some interesting insights for solving the DRM enigma. This article is about the similarities and differences that exist between law and engineering. It is about the nature and value of interdisciplinary research and the importance this approach will have in dealin...

Semiconductor supply chain is increasingly getting exposed to variety of security attacks such as Trojan insertion, cloning, counterfeiting, reverse engineering (RE) and piracy of Intellectual Property (IP) due to involvement of untrusted parties. Camouflaging of gates has been proposed to hide the functionality of gates. However, gate camouflaging is associated with significant area, power and...

Software piracy has been a widespread problem in tertiary institutions and business environment for years. This paper reports a factor analysis to explore some of the issues perceived by tertiary students. The study also attempts to determine the relationship between attitude to software piracy and age, gender, computer ownership, study area of concentration, and history of software copying to ...

Software piracy is the most significant and burning issue in the age of the internet. Software piracy has been a direct threat for software vendors in terms of revenue and, therefore, a number of effective and efficient techniques were employed for detection and prevention of software piracy. One of very important technique is software watermarking and using registration keys. This paper propos...

In an attempt to protect their intellectual property and compete effectively in an increasingly dynamic marketplace, software producers have employed a number of preventive and deterrent measures to counter software piracy. Conventional wisdom suggests that reducing piracy will force consumers to legitimately acquire software, thus increasing firm profits. In this paper, we develop an analytica...

Hardware obfuscating is a proactive design-for-trust technique against IC supply chain threats, i.e., IP piracy and overproduction. Many studies have evaluated numerous techniques for obfuscation purposes. Nevertheless, de-obfuscation attacks demonstrated their insufficiency. This paper proposes register-transfer (RT) level finite-state-machine (FSM) called ReTrustFSM that allows designers to o...

The internet of things (IoT) describes the network physical objects equipped with sensors and other technologies to exchange data devices over Internet. Due its inherent flexibility, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) has become a viable platform for IoT development. However, various security threats such as FPGA bitstream cloning intellectual property (IP) piracy have major concern this devi...