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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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17 years ago

Creating and encrypting netlists

I am trying to create a design for a customer that is part netlist, that they cannot edit, investigate or reverse engineer and part VHDL. They bought an algorithm that integrates into one of our boar...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

I think the reason that there is no "user" encryption is because all the IP encryption, is more a security by obscurity than a true secure encryption.

If you think about it, there is no way to securely encrypt an IP at this level. Like it or not, Quartus must be able to decrypt the IP to produce the configuration file, which means that the key and decryption routine must be local to the user computer.

All you (and Altera) can do is obfuscation, and keep the encryption/decryption process as private and as undocumented as possible.