Reliability and Security in Non-volatile Processors, Two Sides of the Same Coin

Non-volatile processors (NVPs), which harvest energy to power themselves and employ a NV memory hierarchy, are expected to be deployed as edge computation units to gather data or perform operations in either tough environments or for extended periods of time. These devices must not only be reliable to survive their long-term deployments, but also be secure to withstand new types of attacks which can be performed by attackers targeting physically accessible devices. While it may be tempting to view security and reliability as striving to achieve similar goals, they are fundamentally different. In particular, reliability focuses on random uncorrelated faults and thus cannot hope to function in an insecure system where an attacker can (and will) cause correlated faults. This paper studies the security and reliability challenges in the checkpoint system of NVPs, aiming at enhancing the integrity and confidentiality of checkpoints while at the same time protecting the hardware-based checkpoint system against power and wear-out attacks.