AIM: Fast and energy-efficient AES in-memory implementation for emerging non-volatile main memory

Abstract

Non-volatile main memory-based systems pose an opportunity for an attacker to readily access sensitive information on the memory because of its long retention time. While real-time memory encryption with dedicated AES engine can address this vulnerability, it incurs extra performance and energy overheads. As an alternative, we propose an AES in-memory implementation, AIM, to encrypt the whole/part of the memory only when it is necessary. We leverage the benefits offered by the inmemory computing architecture to address the challenges of the bandwidth intensive encryption application. We take advantage of NVM's intrinsic logic operation capability to implement the AES task. Embracing the massive parallelism inside the memory, AIM outperforms existing mechanisms with higher throughput yet lower energy consumption. Compared with state-of-the-art AES engine running at 2.1GHz, AIM can speed up the encryption process by 80 χ for a 1GB NVM.