Seminar – Cédric Marchand, Institut des Nanotechnologies de Lyon – Implementation of hardware security primitives with emerging non-volatile technologies

Implementation of hardware security primitives with emerging non-volatile technologies

Abstract:
Classically, hardware security research uses mature technologies and well-established embedded devices to implement cryptographic algorithms or specific hardware primitives such as random number generators or physical unclonable functions. However, new applications-oriented domains such as the Internet of things but also high-level computing areas (including artificial intelligence for example) led to the need for new architectures which must be secure from the hardware. Indeed, these domains include an impressive quantity of data to be processed by computing architectures and emphasize the Von Neumann bottleneck. A solution to overcome this bottleneck is to use emerging non-volatile technologies such as resistive (RRAM), magnetic (MRAM) or ferroelectric technologies (FeRAM and FeFET). Despite the great interest of the system design community for the wide range of applications these technologies can address, hardware security challenges and opportunities still have to be covered. In this presentation, I will have particular attention for the ferroelectric field effect transistor. I will show how they can be used to implement part of cryptographic algorithms with high energy efficiency, why they can be interesting against classical side channel attacks and how it is possible to integrate them inside known computing architectures.