A survey on memristor modeling and security applications

With the recent advances in memristors as a potential building block for future hardware, it becomes an important and timely topic to study the role that memristors may play in hardware security. To address this issue, this paper presents a survey on research activities on memristor modelling and potential application of memristors in hardware security. First, we give an overview of the current literature on memristor experimentation, characterization, and modeling which includes Chua's original theoretical prediction model, more detailed models based on recent memristor implementations, and the SPICE simulation models. Then, we report the current research efforts on memristor-based security in three major areas: (1) memristor hardware primitives (e.g., physical unclonable function) that are based on the memristor effective resistance model, (2) encryption schemes that leverage the chaotic behavior of the memristor circuit, and (3) security concerns in memristor-based memory systems. We observe that most of these works have limited scope and are based on simplified memristor models which diminish their practical value in security applications. Security applications have strict demands on repeatability, reliability, robustness, unforgeability, cost, resilience, and so on. To address these deficiencies, we propose a list of research areas that need to be addressed for building memristor-based security applications. We also analyze how memristors, as a new hardware building block, will impact major challenges in hardware security.