BlindMarket: Enabling Verifiable, Confidential, and Traceable IP Core Distribution in Zero-Trust Settings
This addresses secure IP trading for hardware vendors and users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing cryptographic and verification techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of hardware IP core distribution in zero-trust settings by developing BlindMarket, a framework that enables verifiable, confidential, and traceable IP trading. The results show successful verification on 12 out of 13 real-world hardware designs with substantial performance improvements from design pruning and heuristics.
We present BlindMarket, an end-to-end zero-trust distribution framework for hardware IP cores. BlindMarket allows two parties, the IP user and the IP vendor, to complete an IP trading process with strong guarantees of verifiability and confidentiality before the transaction, and then traceability after. We propose verification heuristics and adapt the cone of influence-based design pruning to overcome the limited scalability common to cryptographic protocols and the hardness of the underlying hardware verification. We systematically evaluate our framework on a diverse set of real-world hardware benchmarks, and the results demonstrate that BlindMarket effectively completes across a diverse set of real-world hardware IP cores, demonstrating successful verification on 12 out of 13 designs and substantial performance improvements enabled by design pruning and control-flow guided heuristics.