Copy Detection Mechanisms for IP Authentication

Summary

The goal of copy detection techniques is to discover the embedded copyright marks from the IP. Its importance to the constraint-based IP protection paradigm is needless to say, all watermarks and fingerprints are useless unless they can be accurately and effectively identified. However, the general copy detection problem is computational intractable. In this chapter, we discuss this challenging problem and propose three strategically different copy detection approaches. The pattern matching based technique is most natural copy detection method, where the digitalized signature are carefully selected to facilitate fast comparison schemes (pattern matching algorithms) for detection. Its drawback is that, to enable the fast comparison algorithms, one has to first identify certain common structural representation of IPs and what constitutes an element of the IP structure. In addition, one has to determine how to calculate locally context dependent signatures. The forensic engineering technique seeks to identify the source of a given piece of IP from a pool of IP sources. To detect which algorithm is applied to obtain a given solution, one simply needs to check a set of properties based on which the strategically different algorithms (IP sources) are clustered. The main difficulty for this approach is how to extract such properties and in general the detailed information of the algorithms is required. The public detectable watermarking technique is an enhanced watermarking method that facilitates easy and public detection. This is achieved by allowing part of the watermark to be public. Cryptographic techniques, in particular techniques for data integrity, are used to protect the public watermark from forgery. Although this new approach is compatible with all the existing watermarking techniques and has the potential of solving eventually the IP protection problem, it needs help from industrial organizations to push for design standards.