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

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.