High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Hardware obfuscation is a technique by which the description or the structure of electronic hardware is modified to intentionally conceal its functionality, which makes it significantly more difficult to reverse-engineer. In essence, it is different from digital watermarking (where the ownership is concealed in the digital content itself), or from hardware intellectual property (IP) watermarking where the ownership information is embedded and concealed in the description of a circuit. It is also different from cryptography-based hardware IP protection techniques common in the design flow of Field Programmable Gate Array.