A Secure Integrity Checking System for Nanoelectronic Resistive RAM

Recent advances in resistive random access memory (RRAM) as high density, low power, and faster memory systems drive the need for devising a more lightweight integrity checking system for RRAM. In this paper, we design a new tag generation system for integrity checking of RRAM. A single read operation to a crossbar RRAM in the presence of sneak path currents can output a tag for the memory data that can be used for integrity checking. An analytical approach to model such a tag generation process is described in this paper. Security results predicted by the analytical model provide various design options leading to an optimal system from the perspective of considered security properties. The proposed design is simulated to investigate and verify the security properties of the system for a number of optimal design options predicted by the analytical model. Reliability of the proposed system is also measured for varying conditions of device parameters, operating temperatures, load resistances, and read voltage. Finally, the performance of the proposed system is compared against another existing lightweight tag generation method from the perspective of energy consumption, transistor count, and delay.