Pim Tuyls

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.

We investigate the recently introduced notion of smooth Renyi entropy for the case of ergodic information sources, thereby generalizing previous work which concentrated mainly on i.i.d. information sources. We will actually consider ergodic quantum information sources, of which ergodic classical information sources are a special case. We prove that the average smooth Renyi entropy rate will approach the entropy rate of a stationary, ergodic source, which is equal to the Shannon entropy rate for a classical source and the von Neumann entropy rate for a quantum source.

We prove that the average smooth Renyi entropy rate will approach the entropy rate of a stationary, ergodic information source, which is equal to the Shannon entropy rate for a classical information source and the von Neumann entropy rate for a quantum information source.