Comprehensive Study of Side-Channel Attack on Emerging Non-Volatile Memories

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

doi:10.3390/jlpea11040038

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.

Highlights

Several emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) such as Magnetic RAM (MRAM) [1,2], Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM) [3,4,5], Phase Change Memory (PCM) [6,7] and Resistive RAM (RRAM) [8,9] offer high density/speed and low power operation
The adversary can filter out the high frequency components of the total current by applying signal processing [47] since the CPU current frequency is much higher compared to cache current; (ii) the proposed Side Channel Attack (SCA) model is independent of cache size
The unused cache will only contribute to constant leakage which can be filtered out; (iii) the CPUs considered are laptop and PCs the attack can be investigated for Internet of Things (IoTs) as well; and (iv) Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the cryptographic application

Summary

Introduction

Several emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) such as Magnetic RAM (MRAM) [1,2], Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STTRAM) [3,4,5], Phase Change Memory (PCM) [6,7] and Resistive RAM (RRAM) [8,9] offer high density/speed and low (static) power operation. They should be investigated properly before their wide adoption

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion