A provable key destruction scheme based on memristive crossbar arrays

Abstract

Digital keys are commonly used in today’s hardware security systems. However, the provable destruction of these keys after use remains a challenging problem. Most security primitives built using traditional complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor transistors are not well suited to address this issue because of their volatility and unreliability at small scales. Here we show that the unique physical fingerprint of a 128 × 64 hafnium oxide memristor crossbar array integrated with transistors is capable of provable key destruction. The fingerprint is extracted by comparing the conductance of neighbouring memristors, and it can be revealed only if a digital key stored on the same array is erased. On the basis of this provable key destruction technique, we propose a protocol for logic locking/unlocking that can support secure outsourcing of integrated circuit manufacturing. By leveraging the unique properties of memristors, including reconfigurability and variability, our chip demonstrates the integration of security, memory and computing functionalities into the same circuits, and could be used to develop more secure, compact and efficient memristive hardware systems.