Fusing IP vendor Palmprint Biometric with Encoded Hash for Hardware IP Core Protection of Image Processing Filters

Image processing filters offer several significant applications, making them a crucial component of various consumer electronics and multimedia systems. These image filters are designed as dedicated reusable intellectual property (IP) cores using high level synthesis (HLS) framework. These image processing hardware IPs are essential components of several system-on-chips (SoCs) used in mission-critical applications. Therefore, protecting these image filter hardware IPs from an IP vendor’s perspective is crucial against an adversary’s false IP ownership claim in the context of globalized design supply chain. This paper presents a novel hardware IP protection (IPP) technique by fusing the IP vendor’s palmprint biometric and his/her encoded hash to generate secret security constraints for embedding. This embedded security mark acts as a detective countermeasure during the IP conflict resolution process. The proposed approach outperforms recent IPP techniques, as evident by a lower probability of coincidence, stronger tamper tolerance, and stronger entropy value.