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This article introduces a novel, low-cost technique for hiding data in commercially available resistive-RAM (ReRAM) chips. The data is kept hidden in ReRAM cells by manipulating its analog physical properties through switching (set/reset) operations. This hidden data, later, is retrieved by sensing the changes in cells’ physical properties (i.e., set/reset time of the memory cells). The proposed system-level hiding technique does not affect normal memory operations and does not require any hardware modifications. Furthermore, the proposed hiding approach is robust against temperature variations and the aging of the devices through normal read/write operation. The silicon results show that our proposed data hiding technique is acceptably fast with ∼0.12bit/s of encoding and ∼3.26Kbits/s of retrieval rates, and the hidden message is unrecoverable without the knowledge of the secret key, which is used to enhance the security of hidden information.
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Hide-and-Seek: Hiding Secrets in Threshold Voltage Distributions of NAND Flash Memory Cells
In this paper, we propose a new page-writing technique to hide secret information using the threshold voltage variation of programmed memory cells. We demonstrate the proposed technique on the state-of-the-art commercial 3D NAND flash memory chips by utilizing common user mode commands. We explore the design space metrics of interest for data hiding: bit accuracy of public and secret data and detectability of holding secret data. The proposed method ensures more than 97% accuracy of recovered secret data, with negligible accuracy loss in the public data. Our analysis shows that the proposed technique introduces negligible distortions in the threshold voltage distributions. These distortions are lower than the inherent threshold voltage variations of program states. As a result, the proposed method provides a hiding technique that is undetectable, even by a powerful adversary with low-level access to the memory chips.
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- PAR ID:
- 10432059
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 80 to 86
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3599691.3603415
