Signature Biometric based Authentication of IP Cores for Secure Electronic Systems

Intellectual property (IP) piracy has emerged as a potential hardware security threat in the last few decades. Growing usage of electronic systems in critical applications such as military and healthcare entails integrating only authentic functional blocks or IP cores into the system-on-chips (SoCs). The usage of only authentic IP cores can be ensured by detecting the designer's secret information hidden into the IP core designs, thereby protecting from the pirated or fake IPs. This paper proposes first time the designer's handwritten signature biometric based authentication of IP cores. In this paper, a digest of the designer's signature biometric is generated using the proposed approach. Further, the digest of the signature biometric is mapped into the corresponding hardware security constraints to be implanted into the IP core design during the behavioral synthesis process. The presence of designer's signature biometric into the IP core design ensures unique identification of the genuine vendor during authentication. The robustness of the proposed approach has been measured using a probability of coincidence metric based security analysis. Finally, the results reveal that the proposed approach yields higher security at negligible cost overhead.