International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The protection of intelligent property (IP) is a challenging task, especially in secured embedded systems where program code that is supposed to be a plagiarism cannot be simply read-out for further inspection. This is even more aggravated if the original source code was modified to prevent comparisons of any kind. For instance, watermarks that are actually hidden in the code are at risk to be rendered useless if the attacker has full access to the original code and some knowledge about the watermark. The unlicensed use of patented algorithms is a further problem that belongs to IP plagiarism as well. A Recent work presented a framework based on perceptual hashing to detect intelligent property in hardware and software designs. In this work we consequently extend this framework to detect IP plagiarism in embedded systems that can reliably match contents even in the presence of attacks. Therefore, we propose an adapted signal feature extraction method, the wavelet transform, to form a keyed side-channel hash function.