Secure licensing of IP cores on SRAM-based FPGAs

Abstract

The rapid increase in FPGA devices' capacity has enabled the implementation of complete sophisticated systems. The widening design productivity gap and shrinking time-to-market window have made licensing of external IP cores for system development pervade. The upfront IP licensing model currently used in the market is not a good fit to the FPGA IP market as the blanket IP license fee is too expensive for the majority of FPGA-based system developers who target low-to-medium volume applications. This chapter presents a detailed discussion on secure licensing of the IP cores that is more suitable for FPGA IP market. After the background information such as the stakeholders in the market, common attacks to the IP cores and desiderata for an effective licensing scheme have been presented, two categories of IP licensing schemes, i.e., those that employ only the conventional crypto primitives and those that exploit the emerging PUF primitive, are detailed and illustrated. The shared target of these schemes is to realize a secure pay-per-use licensing model where the system developer is proportionally charged for the use of the IP core. Along with the discussion of the schemes, some noteworthy features are also highlighted such as the authenticity of the IP core as well as the fault tolerance, tamper and side-channel resistance of the employed hardware primitives. The aim of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive overview of existing developments in FPGA IP licensing protocols and facilitate the development of new schemes that are more efficient and costeffective.