SMART: Secure Magnetoelectric AntifeRromagnet-Based Tamper-Proof Non-Volatile Memory

Abstract

Data theft and tampering are serious concerns as attackers have aggressively begun to exploit weaknesses in current memory systems to advance their nefarious schemes. The storage industry is moving toward emerging non-volatile memories (NVM), including the spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive random access memory (STT-MRAM) and the phase change memory (PCM), owing to their high density and low power operation. The advent of novel memory technologies has led to new vulnerabilities including data sensitivity to magnetic field and temperature fluctuations and data persistence after power down. In this paper, we propose SMART: a Secure Magnetoelectric Antiferromagnet-Based Tamper-Proof memory, which leverages unique properties of antiferromagnetic materials and offers dense, on-chip non-volatile storage. SMART memory is not only resilient against data confidentiality attacks seeking to leak sensitive information but also protects data integrity and prevents Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on the memory. It is impervious to power side-channel attacks, which exploit asymmetric reads/writes for 0 and 1 logic levels, and photonic side-channel attacks, which monitor photo-emission signatures from the chip backside. Further, the ultra-low power magnetoelectric switching coupled with the terahertz regime antiferromagnetic dynamics result in 4 orders lower energy-per-bit and 3 orders smaller latency for the SMART memory as compared to prior NVMs such as STT-MRAM and PCM.