Preventing IP Over-Deployment Through a Public/Secret-key Encryption Mechanism

The lack of absolute protection for the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of an IP provider has been a major hindrance of the IP core market for FPGAs. This work proposes a system that allows the IP provider to charge for the number of instances the core is used and protect against malicious over- deployment. The system is based on device-specific design encryption using secured device identification to ensure that the IP can only be deployed into explicitly identified and agreed upon devices. The system uses a combination of secret and public-key cryptographic functions devised for an uncomplicated trustable design exchange scenario. The public-key functions use modular squaring (Rabin Lock) instead of exponentiation to reduce the hardware complexity.