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

2026-03-23

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenges of hardware intellectual property (IP) core distribution in zero-trust environments, where pre-transaction verification must preserve both confidentiality and verifiability, and post-transaction traceability is often lacking. The paper presents the first end-to-end zero-trust framework for hardware IP distribution, integrating cone-of-influence pruning with control-flow heuristics to enable efficient verification while maintaining IP confidentiality and supporting post-transaction traceability. By circumventing the scalability limitations of conventional cryptographic protocols in hardware verification, the proposed approach achieves significant performance gains. Experimental evaluation on 13 real-world IP cores demonstrates successful verification of 12 cores, highlighting a marked improvement in verification efficiency and practical applicability.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

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.

Problem

• IP core distribution
• zero-trust
• verifiability
• confidentiality
• traceability

Innovation

• zero-trust
• hardware IP core
• verifiable computing
• design pruning
• cone of influence