Investigation of Side Channel Leakage of FeRAM Using Discrete Wavelet Transform

Ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM) is a Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) which offers high endurance, fast speed, low power and high density. Thus, they are suitable to replace conventional memories such as Dynamic RAM (DRAM). However, FeRAM are vulnerable to side channel attack. An adversary can measure the current drawn by the memory during read and write operation and find corresponding data being written to it or being read from the memory. This is a major problem for FeRAM as it would compromise the security of data being transmitted over communication networks. This work, for the first time, investigates the vulnerability of FeRAMs with noise. We have used Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to reduce measurement noise since it is widely used for reducing noise from different type of signals. SureShrink operation is performed for noise reduction of write and read current. The analysis of noise filtered write and read current reveals that, FeRAM write operation is vulnerable to side channel attack whereas its read operation is resilient to such attacks since the data signature in the read current is minimal and vanishes due to measurement/environment noise.