RRAM motifs for mitigating differential power analysis attacks (DPA)

Abstract

Hybrid Resistive Random Access Memory(RRAM)/CMOS architectures offer several opportunities in the next generation high performance systems. These systems are vulnerable to side channel attacks(SPA), including Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attacks. An architecture with cryptoco processors integrated on a dedicated CMOS layer and the associated memory on the RRAM layer, can help mitigate the side channel attacks on these systems. In particular, we focus on the DPA attacks which can compromise the system performance, by statistically analyzing information of intermediate results in a cryptographic computation. In this paper we propose the use of RRAM to obscure the power signals that mitigate the DPA attacks. RRAM motifs are dynamically reconfigurable hardware crossbar structures that can be programmed on-the-fly in to a memory or sensing elements. We investigate a 4x64 RRAMmotif that can perform memory and sensing in tandem. Our analysis shows that we cannot easily distinguish between the memory access and sensing operations. Though the power dissipated in the best and worst case scenarios when reading from an RRAM motif varied by 9%, it does not provide any additional information on the specific access. Additionally, it was observed that the variations in the voltage and temperature of the RRAM generate noise in guessing the sub key and enhances the DPA resiliency of the system. © 2012 IEEE.