Protecting Trojan Secured DSP cores against IP piracy using Facial Biometrics

This paper presents a hardware security methodology for protecting the Trojan secured digital signal processing (DSP) cores against the threat of intellectual property (IP) counterfeiting/piracy using facial biometric based security approach. In the proposed methodology at first, DSP designs are leveraged with Trojan detection capability by constructing the Trojan secured designs using distinct multi-vendor policy. The Trojan secured design is constructed by creating a sister unit of the original DSP design by duplicating its operations. Subsequently, the facial signature has been generated from the facial features of genuine IP owner. Finally, this generated facial signature is embedded into the design in the form of covert secret security constraints during high-level synthesis (HLS) process. Thus, the proposed approach ensures the stronger security of the target Trojan secured design against IP piracy. The security strength of the proposed methodology is measured using probability of coincidence (Pc) and the probability for an attacker to extract the exact signature combination to prove the IP ownership `P(f)'. Further, the proposed methodology incurs zero design overhead while enabling the robust protection of the Trojan secured DSP cores using facial biometric security.