Hiding Information for Secure and Covert Data Storage in Commercial ReRAM Chips

This article introduces a novel, low-cost technique for hiding data incommercially available resistive-RAM (ReRAM) chips. The data is kept hidden inReRAM cells by manipulating its analog physical properties through switching($\textit{set/reset}$) operations. This hidden data, later, is retrieved bysensing the changes in cells' physical properties (i.e., $\textit{set/reset}$time of the memory cells). The proposed system-level hiding technique does notaffect the normal memory operations and does not require any hardwaremodifications. Furthermore, the proposed hiding approach is robust againsttemperature variations and the aging of the devices through normal read/writeoperation. The silicon results show that our proposed data hiding technique isacceptably fast with ${\sim}0.4bit/min$ of encoding and ${\sim}15.625bits/s$ ofretrieval rates, and the hidden message is unrecoverable without the knowledgeof the secret key, which is used to enhance the security of hidden information.