Hardware Security in Spin-Based Computing-In-Memory: Analysis, Exploits, and Mitigation Techniques

TL;DR

This paper explores the security aspects of spintronics-based computing-in-memory (SpinCIM), analyzing its potential to improve hardware security and identifying new security challenges introduced by this emerging paradigm.

Contribution

It is the first to analyze SpinCIM from a security perspective, addressing how it can enhance security and what vulnerabilities it may introduce.

Findings

SpinCIM offers potential security benefits over traditional architectures.

New security vulnerabilities are identified in SpinCIM systems.

Mitigation techniques for SpinCIM security issues are discussed.

Abstract

Computing-in-memory (CIM) is proposed to alleviate the processor-memory data transfer bottleneck in traditional Von-Neumann architectures, and spintronics-based magnetic memory has demonstrated many facilitation in implementing CIM paradigm. Since hardware security has become one of the major concerns in circuit designs, this paper, for the first time, investigates spin-based computing-in-memory (SpinCIM) from a security perspective. We focus on two fundamental questions: 1) how the new SpinCIM computing paradigm can be exploited to enhance hardware security? 2) what security concerns has this new SpinCIM computing paradigm incurred?