Fault Attack Investigation on TaOx Resistive-RAM for Cyber Secure Application

Resilience against fault attacks is essential for edge devices embedding emerging memories as the memory’s integrity serves as the root of trust (RoT). In this work, simple two-terminal emerging oxide-based random access memory (Oxide RRAM) has been studied for its susceptibility to fault attacks induced into the memory state switching mechanism. We have demonstrated that an Oxide RRAM cell ON state is resilient against laser, electromagnetic (EM), and reading-stress fault attacks, while the OFF state is vulnerable against all the above-mentioned fault attacks. However, precise control of the applied power is essential to induce a transient fault in the OFF state. Fault attacks affect the memory cell periphery significantly more than individual memory cells. These results suggest that Oxide RRAM can only make a secure system if the countermeasures are built across the OFF states.