ENEE: 759Q - Intellectual Property Protection: From Multimedia Data to VLSI Design and Software.

Course Goals:

Reuse-based design methodology is considered as the most promising solution to close the increasing gap between silicon's capacity and design productivity. To enable design reuse, design teams have to make public much more detailed information about their design. This has created an urgent and rather unique need for mechanisms to protect such intellectual properties (IPs). In this course, we first give an overview of state-of-the-art information hiding techniques for multimedia contents such as text, image, audio, and video. Then we discuss the challenges for VLSI design IP protection. We will focus on the constraint-based "watermarking, fingerprinting, and copy detection" IP protection paradigm. This course will also cover industrial standards on IP protection, software watermarking and obfuscating, and basics on applied cryptography.

Course Prerequisite(s):

At least one graduate-level computer engineering courses ENEE64x or permission of the instructor (see below for the topic prerequisites).

Topics Prerequisite(s):

Basic understanding of VLSI design cycles, mathematical modeling and analysis, fundamental on algorithm and graph theory, Verilog basics.

Textbook(s)

None

Reference(s):

Books:
  1. "Reuse Methodology Manual for System-on-a-Chip Designs" by M. Keating and P. Bricaud.
  2. "Digital Watermarking" by I.J. Cox, M. Miller, and J. Bloom.
  3. "A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography" by N.I. Koblitz.
  4. "Intellectual Property Protection in VLSI CAD: Theory and Practice", by G. Qu and M. Potkonjak.
Conference Proceedings:
  1. Springer-Verlag LNCS on Information Hiding Workshops.
  2. IEEE/ACM International Conference on CAD, Digest of Technical Papers.
  3. ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference Proceedings.
Other References:
  1. Recent articles on reuse-based design and VLSI IP protection.
  2. Documents on industrial standards on reuse-based system design.
  3. State-of-the-art techniques on multimedia digital watermarking and software obfuscating.

Core Topics:

Basics on Cryptography
  • some simple cryptosystems
  • basic cryptographic protocols
  • public key cryptography
Brief Review on Multimedia Watermarking
  • applications of digital watermarking
  • requirements for digital watermarking
  • basic digital watermarking techniques
  • watermark detection and analysis
Constraint-based VLSI IP Protection Techniques
  • challenges in VLSI design IP protection
  • constraint-based watermarking: approach and key idea
  • mathematical foundations for constraint-based watermarking
  • optimization-intensive watermarking techniques
  • fingerprinting techniques
  • copy detection mechanisms for VLSI IP authentication Software Watermarking and Obfuscating Methods

Optional Topics:

  • Steganography.
  • Verilog code watermarking.
  • Pattern matching for copy detection.
  • Intermediate and advance cryptographic protocols.
  • Forensic engineering and its application on VLSI IP protection.

Course Structure:

The course materials will be delivered by means of lectures, readings, seminar-like presentations, and project development. Regular lectures will be given in the first half of the semester. Meanwhile, student/team starts reading technical articles and selects project topics. In the second half, students will be required to present papers in class and to report the progress of their project. Extensive reading of research papers are required and students are expected to actively involved in both lecture and paper discussions. At the end of the semester, each student/team will have 15-30 minutes to present their project.

Grading Method:

The grading will be based on the student's performance in class participation, paper presentation, and the research project. More specifically:

Class participation:20%
Paper presentation:20%
Project:60%

| Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering | A. James Clark School of Engineering | University of Maryland |