Name
Title | ||
|---|---|---|
A Near-Instantaneous and Non-Invasive Erasure Design Technique to Protect Sensitive Data Stored in Secure SRAMs |
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
On-chip memories, and in particular SRAMs, are among the most critical components in terms of data security because they might contain sensitive data such as secret keys. Whenever a tampering event is detected, one should be able to erase efficiently and rapidly the full content of a memory holding such sensitive data, but current solutions based on simple power-off lead to very long erasure times. In this paper, we present a non-invasive design technique based on an innovative mechanism to remove electric charges from SRAM bitcells still powered on, before refreshing them with a new content not correlated with the previous one. The particularity of this novel hardware countermeasure is to be natively compatible with any SRAM circuit designed from pushed-rule foundry bitcells. We have designed and characterized an 8kB SRAM in 22nm FD-SOI process technology exploiting the proposed security strategy demonstrating an erase operation accomplished in the nanosecond time scale (versus 295 mu s with the conventional power-off solution) at the cost of an additional area of less than 5%. We have also shown that our solution is more efficient than a solution without prior erasure consisting in writing identical data to all memory addresses in a single clock cycle (1 ns). The use of the latter drops the ratio of zeroized addresses at 92%, while increasing the operating energy consumption by 2.1x under nominal operating conditions. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2021 | 10.1109/ESSCIRC53450.2021.9567885 | ESSCIRC 2021 - IEEE 47TH EUROPEAN SOLID STATE CIRCUITS CONFERENCE (ESSCIRC) |
DocType | ISSN | Citations |
Conference | 1930-8833 | 0 |
PageRank | References | Authors |
0.34 | 0 | 11 |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| J.-P. Noel | 1 | 1 | 1.38 |
| M. Pezzin | 2 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Jean-Frédéric Christmann | 3 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Lorenzo Ciampolini | 4 | 0 | 0.34 |
| M. Le Coadou | 5 | 0 | 0.34 |
| M. Diallo | 6 | 1 | 1.04 |
| F. Lepin | 7 | 0 | 0.34 |
| B. Blampey | 8 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Simone Bacles-Min | 9 | 0 | 0.34 |
| R. Wacquez | 10 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Bastien Giraud | 11 | 53 | 17.41 |