Intellectual property protection for FPGA designs using the public key cryptography

For the copyright protection in intellectual property reuse technology, we must ensure that when an intellectual property watermark verifier leaks the secret key of an intellectual property watermark system, a malicious attacker could not guess the key to facilitate successful attacks on the watermarks. Therefore, this work proposes a robust intellectual property watermarking algorithm based on elliptic-curve cryptography. The physical layout of intellectual property design is abstracted into a graph with tree structure by using the topology theory. A secure model based on the asymmetric encryption model is proposed to encrypt the watermark positions. The generated graph and a random searching algorithm are used for the distribution of the watermark positions. Finally, the watermarks are inserted by reordering the redundant attributes in the graph. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm will insert more watermark constraints under the same condition. Thus, the probability of coincidence is lower, achieving good reliability. In addition, when the watermarks are impaired due to attacks, the algorithm can restore the original watermarks from the topology graph. In comparison to other algorithms, the proposed algorithm has good performance in watermark capacity and overhead, as well as provides resilience to the typical attacks.