Comprehensive study of side-channel attack on emerging non-volatile memories

Mohammad Nasim Imtiaz Khan, Shivam Bhasin, Bo Liu, Alex Yuan, Anupam Chattopadhyay, Swaroop Ghosh

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) such as Magnetic RAM (MRAM), Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM), Phase Change Memory (PCM) and Resistive RAM (RRAM) are very promising due to their low (static) power operation, high scalability and high performance. However, these memories bring new threats to data security. In this paper, we investigate their vulnerability against Side Channel Attack (SCA). We assume that the adversary can monitor the supply current of the memory array consumed during read/write operations and recover the secret key of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) execution. First, we show our analysis of simulation results. Then, we use commercial NVM chips to validate the analysis. We also investigate the effectiveness of encoding against SCA on emerging NVMs. Finally, we summarize two new flavors of NVMs that can be resilient against SCA. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to do a comprehensive study of SCA vulnerability of the majority of emerging NVM-based cache.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number38
JournalJournal of Low Power Electronics and Applications
Volume11
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2021

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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