Assuring Security and Reliability of Emerging Non-Volatile Memories

Abstract

At the end of Silicon roadmap, keeping the leakage power in tolerable limit has become one of the biggest challenges. Several promising Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) offering high-density, high speed, and competitive reliability/endurance while eliminating leakage issues are being investigated. On one hand, the above-desired properties make emerging NVM suitable candidates to assist or replace conventional memories in memory hierarchy as well as to infuse compute capability to eliminate Von-Neumann bottleneck. On the other hand, their unique features such as high and asymmetric read/write current and persistence bring new threats to data security while compute-capability imposes new fundamentally different security challenges. Some of these memories are already deployed in full systems and as discrete chips. Therefore, it is utmost important to investigate the security issues of NVMs spanning the application space. This work makes pioneering contributions to this challenge through a holistic approach- from devices to circuits and systems using a combination of design and test methodologies to develop secure and resilient NVMs. The proposed attacks and countermeasures are validated on test boards using commercial NVM chips. Finally, this research has been tied to education by converting the test boards to design a modular and reproducible self-learning cybersecurity kit which has been piloted to train graduate and undergraduate students and K-12 teachers.