BlindMarket: Enabling Verifiable, Confidential, and Traceable IP Core Distribution in Zero-Trust Settings

TL;DR

BlindMarket is a comprehensive zero-trust framework for hardware IP core distribution that ensures verifiability, confidentiality, and traceability, addressing scalability challenges with innovative heuristics and design pruning techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel end-to-end framework for secure hardware IP trading with verification heuristics and scalable design pruning, improving upon existing cryptographic protocols.

Findings

Successfully verified 12 out of 13 hardware IP cores

Achieved significant performance improvements through design pruning

Demonstrated effectiveness on diverse real-world benchmarks

Abstract

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.