Protecting Hardware Circuit Design by Secret Sharing

Techniques are able to lock and unlock and integrated circuit (IC) based device by encrypting/decrypting a bus on the device. The bus may be a system bus for the IC, a bus within the IC, or an external input/output bus. A shared secret protocol is used between an IC designer and a fabrication facility building the IC. The IC at the fabrication facility scrambles the bus on the IC using an encryption key generated from unique identification data received from the IC designer. With the IC bus locked by the encryption key, only the IC designer may be able to determine and communicate the appropriate activation key required to unlock (e.g., unscramble) the bus and thus make the integrated circuit usable.

Attached files:
US 20100287374.jpg

Patents:
US 20,100,287,374

Inventor(s): ROY JARROD A [US]; KOUSHANFAR FARINAZ [US]; MARKOV IGOR L [US]

Type of Offer: Licensing



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