Serial RRAM Cell for Secure Bit Concealing

Abstract

Non-volatile memory cells are exposed to adversary attacks since any active countermeasure is useless when the device is powered off. In this context, this work proposes the association of two serial RRAM devices as a basic cell to store sensitive data, which could solve this bothersome problem. This cell has three states: ‘1’, ‘0’, and masked. When the system is powered off or the data is not used, the cell is set to the masked state, where the cell still stores a ‘1’ or a ‘0’ but a malicious adversary is not capable of extracting the stored value using reverse engineering techniques. Before reading, the cell needs to be unmasked and it is masked afterwards until the next reading request. The operation of the cell also provides robustness against side-channel attacks. The presented experimental results confirm the validity of the proposal.