Two IP Protection Schemes for Multi-FPGA Systems

Lubos Gaspar (1) , Viktor Fischer (1) , Tim Guneysu (2) , Zouha Cherif (3)

1 LHC - Laboratoire Hubert Curien
2 Horst Gortz Institute for IT Security
3 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information

This paper proposes two novel protection schemes for multi-FPGA systems providing high security of IP designs licensed by IP vendors to system integrators and installed remotely in a hostile environment. In the first scheme, these useful properties are achieved by storing two different configuration keys inside an FPGA, while in the second scheme, they are obtained using a hardware white-box cipher for creating a trusted environment. Thanks to the proposed principles, FPGA configurations coming from different IP owners cannot be cloned or reverse-engineered by any involved party, including system integrator and other IP owners. The proposed schemes can be directly implemented in recent FPGAs such as Xilinx Spartan 6 and Virtex 6.

Keywords: IP protection schemes; white-box cipher; licensing; FPGA

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Embedded Systems; Computer Science [cs]; Cryptography and Security [cs.CR]

Lubos Gaspar, Viktor Fischer, Tim Guneysu, Zouha Cherif. Two IP Protection Schemes for Multi-FPGA Systems. ReConFig' 12, Dec 2012, cancun, Mexico. pp.2568809. ⟨ujm-00763142⟩