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A provable key destruction scheme based on memristive crossbar arrays

Nature Electronics volume 1, pages 548–554 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Digital keys are commonly used in today’s hardware security systems. However, the provable destruction of these keys after use remains a challenging problem. Most security primitives built using traditional complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor transistors are not well suited to address this issue because of their volatility and unreliability at small scales. Here we show that the unique physical fingerprint of a 128 × 64 hafnium oxide memristor crossbar array integrated with transistors is capable of provable key destruction. The fingerprint is extracted by comparing the conductance of neighbouring memristors, and it can be revealed only if a digital key stored on the same array is erased. On the basis of this provable key destruction technique, we propose a protocol for logic locking/unlocking that can support secure outsourcing of integrated circuit manufacturing. By leveraging the unique properties of memristors, including reconfigurability and variability, our chip demonstrates the integration of security, memory and computing functionalities into the same circuits, and could be used to develop more secure, compact and efficient memristive hardware systems.

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Fig. 1: The principle of provable key destruction.
Fig. 2: 128 × 64 one-transistor one-Ta/HfO2/Pt-memristor (1T1R) array.
Fig. 3: Unique and reliable fingerprints in large memristor crossbar arrays.
Fig. 4: Experimental demonstration of provable key destruction in a 128 × 64 memristor crossbar array.
Fig. 5: Detailed design of relockable logic locking/unlocking with provable key destruction.

Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL; grant no. FA8750-15-2-0044), and the National Science Foundation (CNS-1749845). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of AFRL. R.Z. and P.Y. are on leave from Tianjin University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and acknowledge the support from the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) under grants 201606250162 and 201606160074, respectively. The authors would like to thank X. Xu and S. Pi for helpful discussions.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Hao Jiang and Can Li.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Hao Jiang, Can Li, Rui Zhang, Peng Yan, Peng Lin, Yunning Li, J. Joshua Yang, Daniel Holcomb & Qiangfei Xia

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  1. Hao Jiang
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Contributions

Q.X., D.H., J.J.Y. and H.J. conceived the idea and designed the experiments. P.Y., C.L. and H.J. built the integrated chips. H.J., C.L. and R.Z. performed electrical measurements. Q.X., D.H., J.J.Y and H.J. analysed the data. Y.L. and P.L. helped with experiments and data analysis. Q.X., D.H. and H.J. wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results, and commented on and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to J. Joshua Yang, Daniel Holcomb or Qiangfei Xia.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1–6, Supplementary Table 1, and Supplementary Notes 1–3

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Jiang, H., Li, C., Zhang, R. et al. A provable key destruction scheme based on memristive crossbar arrays. Nat Electron 1, 548–554 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-018-0146-5

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