Securing Hardware Accelerators for CE Systems Using Biometric Fingerprinting

This article presents a novel methodology to secure hardware accelerators (such as digital signal processing (DSP) and multimedia intellectual property (IP) cores) against ownership threats/IP piracy using biometric fingerprinting. In this approach, an IP vendor's biometric fingerprint is first converted into a corresponding digital template, followed by embedding fingerprint's digital template into the design in the form of secret biometric constraints; thereby generating a secured hardware accelerator design. The results report the following qualitative and quantitative analysis of the proposed biometric fingerprint approach: 1) impact of 11 different fingerprints on probability of coincidence (Pc) metric. As evident, the proposed approach achieves a very low Pc value in the range of 2.22E-3 to 4.35E-6. Further, the biometric fingerprint achieves total constraints size between minimum 350 bits to maximum 895 bits; 2) impact of six different resource constraints on the design cost overhead of JPEG compression hardware postembedding biometric fingerprint. As evident, for all the resource constraints implemented, the design cost overhead is 0%; and 3) comparative analysis of proposed biometric fingerprint with recent work, for five different signature strength values, in terms of Pc. As evident, the proposed approach achieves minimum 3.9E+2 times and maximum 6.9E+4 times lower Pc, when compared to recent work.