Information Leakage Attacks on Emerging Non-Volatile Memory and Countermeasures

Abstract

Emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) suffer from high and asymmetric read/write current and long write latency which can result in supply noise, such as supply voltage droop and ground bounce. The magnitude of supply noise depends on the old data and the new data that is being written (for a write operation) or on the stored data (for a read operation). Therefore, victim's write operation creates a supply noise which propagates to adversary's memory space. The adversary can detect victim's write initiation and can leverage faster read latency (compared to write) to further sense the Hamming Weight (HW) of the victim's write data by detecting read failures in his memory space. These attacks are specifically possible if exhaustive testing of the memory for all patterns, all possible location combinations, all possible parallel read/write conditions are not performed under bit-to-bit process variations and specified (-10°C to 90°C) and unspecified temperature ranges (i.e., less than -10°C and greater than 90°C). Simulation result indicates that adversary can sense HW of victim's (near-by) write data = 66.77%, and further narrow the range based on read/write failure characteristics. Side Channel Attacks can utilize this information to strengthen the attacks.