RSAK: Random stream attack for phase change memory in video applications

As an emerging non-volatile memory technology, phase change memory (PCM) is promising as an alternative for traditional memories such as DRAM. In spite of its non-volatility, high density, low standby power, and resilience to soft errors, PCM has a limited write endurance or lifetime, which means that each PCM cell can only be overwritten finite times. More importantly, limited lifetime potentially provides malicious attackers an opportunity to intentionally aggravate write traffic into PCM. In this paper, from the standpoint of attackers, we propose random stream attacks (RSAK) methods for phase change memory used in video applications. Experimental results show that compared to natural video sequences, RSAK incurs higher total write traffic or worsened lifetime. RSAK also gives hints on how to build a more secure PCM in video applications to counter malicious write streams.

[1]  Miodrag Potkonjak,et al.  Coding-based energy minimization for Phase Change Memory , 2012, DAC Design Automation Conference 2012.

[2]  Huawei Li,et al.  SoftPCM: Enhancing Energy Efficiency and Lifetime of Phase Change Memory in Video Applications via Approximate Write , 2012, 2012 IEEE 21st Asian Test Symposium.

[3]  Wei Xu,et al.  Data manipulation techniques to reduce phase change memory write energy , 2009, ISLPED.

[4]  Sunggu Lee,et al.  Optimizing Video Application Design for Phase-Change RAM-Based Main Memory , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems.

[5]  Jun Yang,et al.  A durable and energy efficient main memory using phase change memory technology , 2009, ISCA '09.

[6]  Huiyang Zhou,et al.  Improving privacy and lifetime of PCM-based main memory , 2010, 2010 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems & Networks (DSN).

[7]  Hsien-Hsin S. Lee,et al.  SAFER: Stuck-At-Fault Error Recovery for Memories , 2010, 2010 43rd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture.

[8]  Jacob Nelson,et al.  Dense Approximate Storage in Phase-Change Memory , 2011 .

[9]  Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan,et al.  Scalable high performance main memory system using phase-change memory technology , 2009, ISCA '09.

[10]  Rami G. Melhem,et al.  RDIS: A recursively defined invertible set scheme to tolerate multiple stuck-at faults in resistive memory , 2012, IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2012).

[11]  Eero P. Simoncelli,et al.  Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[12]  Hsien-Hsin S. Lee,et al.  Security refresh: prevent malicious wear-out and increase durability for phase-change memory with dynamically randomized address mapping , 2010, ISCA.

[13]  André Seznec.  A Phase Change Memory as a Secure Main Memory , 2010, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters.

[14]  Seung-Yun Lee,et al.  A Low Power Phase-Change Random Access Memory using a Data-Comparison Write Scheme , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

[15]  Vijayalakshmi Srinivasan,et al.  Enhancing lifetime and security of PCM-based Main Memory with Start-Gap Wear Leveling , 2009, 2009 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO).

[16]  Peter Norvig,et al.  The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data , 2009, IEEE Intelligent Systems.

[17]  Nur A. Touba,et al.  Designing a fast and adaptive error correction scheme for increasing the lifetime of phase change memories , 2011, 29th VLSI Test Symposium.

[18]  Naehyuck Chang,et al.  Energy- and endurance-aware design of phase change memory caches , 2010, 2010 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE 2010).

[19]  Alan C. Bovik,et al.  Image information and visual quality , 2006, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[20]  Yiran Chen,et al.  Emerging non-volatile memories: Opportunities and challenges , 2011, 2011 Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS).

[21]  Onur Mutlu,et al.  Architecting phase change memory as a scalable dram alternative , 2009, ISCA '09.

[22]  Hyunjin Lee,et al.  Flip-N-Write: A simple deterministic technique to improve PRAM write performance, energy and endurance , 2009, 2009 42nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO).

[23]  Yan Solihin,et al.  Defining Anomalous Behavior for Phase Change Memory , 2009 .

[24]  Yan Solihin,et al.  i-NVMM: A secure non-volatile main memory system with incremental encryption , 2011, 2011 38th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA).

[25]  Luis A. Lastras,et al.  Practical and secure PCM systems by online detection of malicious write streams , 2011, 2011 IEEE 17th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture.