Watermarked ReRAM: A Technique to Prevent Counterfeit Memory Chips

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost watermarking technique for resistive-RAM devices that embeds irreversible marks by manipulating physical properties, effectively preventing counterfeiting with robustness and acceptable speed.

Contribution

It presents a novel system-level framework for embedding irreversible watermarks into ReRAM by controlling physical characteristics during switching operations.

Findings

Watermarking is robust against temperature variations.

Imprinting rate is approximately 0.6 bits per minute.

Retrieval rate is about 15.625 bits per second.

Abstract

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.