Physical Unclonable Functions and Public-Key Crypto for FPGA IP Protection

Abstract

In recent years, IP protection of FPGA hardware designs has become a requirement for many IP vendors. To this end solutions have been proposed based on the idea of bitstream encryption, symmetric-key primitives, and the use of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). In this paper, we propose new protocols for the IP protection problem on FPGAs based on public-key (PK) cryptography, analyze the advantages and costs of such an approach, and describe a PUF intrinsic to current FPGAs based on SRAM properties. A major advantage of using PK-based protocols is that they do not require the private key stored in the FPGA to leave the device, thus increasing security. This added security comes at the cost of additional hardware resources but it does not cause significant performance degradation.