Electronic counterfeiting is a longstanding problem with adverse long-term effects for many sectors, remaining on the rise. This article presents a novel low-cost technique to embed watermarking in devices with resistive-RAM (ReRAM) by manipulating its analog physical characteristics through switching (set/reset) operation to prevent counterfeiting. We develop a system-level framework to control memory cells' physical properties for imprinting irreversible watermarks into commercial ReRAMs that will be retrieved by sensing the changes in cells' physical properties. Experimental results show that our proposed ReRAM watermarking is robust against temperature variation and acceptably fast with ~0.6bit/min of imprinting and ~15.625bits/s of retrieval rates.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2025
Hiding Information for Secure and Covert Data Storage in Commercial ReRAM Chips
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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- Award ID(s):
- 2114200
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10506960
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
- Volume:
- 19
- ISSN:
- 1556-6013
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3608 to 3619
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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