Deep Reinforcement Learning for Resource Protection and Real-Time Detection in IoT Environment

With the fast advancements of electronic chip technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT), it is urgent to address the copyright protection issue of intellectual property (IP) circuit resources of the electronic devices in IoT environments. In this article, a fast deep-reinforcement-learning (DRL)-based detection algorithm for virtual IP watermarks is proposed by combining the technologies of mapping function and DRL to preprocess the ownership information of the IP circuit resource. The deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm is used to generate the watermarked positions adaptively, making the watermarked positions secure yet close to the original design, turning the watermarked positions secure. An artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm is utilized for training the position distance characteristic vectors of the IP circuit, in which the characteristic function of the virtual position for IP watermark is generated after training. In IP ownership verification, the DRL model can quickly locate the range of virtual watermark positions. With the characteristic values of the virtual positions in each lookup table (LUT) area and surrounding areas, the mapping position relationship can be calculated in a supervised manner in the neural network, as the algorithm realizes the fast location of the real ownership information in an IP circuit. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the speed of watermark detection as also reducing the resource overhead. Besides, it also achieves excellent performance in security.