Graph Coloring Approach for Hiding of Information

Abstract Sharing IP blocks in today's competitive market poses significant high security risks. Creators and owners of IP designs want assurances that their content will not be illegally redistributed by consumers, and consumers want assurances that the content they buy is legitimate. To protect a digital product, one of the ways is to embed an author's signature into the object in the form of minute errors. However, this technique is directly not applicable to protect intellectual properties such as solution of hard problems which must maintain the correct functionality. In this paper we propose a constrained-based watermarking technique and lay out a theoretical framework to evaluate watermarking techniques for intellectual property protection (IPP). Based on this framework, we analyze a watermarking technique for the graph coloring problem. Since credibility and overhead are the most important criteria for any efficient watermarking technique, we derive formulae that illustrate the trade-off between credibility and overhead.