Reliable and Secure Memories Based on Algebraic Manipulation Detection Codes and Robust Error Correction

The reliability and security of memories are crucial considerations in the modern digital system design. Traditional codes concentrate on detecting and correcting errors of certain types, e.g., errors with small multiplicities or byte errors, and cannot detect or correct unanticipated errors. Thereby, they may not be sufficient to protect memories against malicious attackers with strong fault injection capabilities and cannot correct unexpected errors with high multiplicities. The contribution of this paper is that we construct a new reliable and secure memory architecture based on robust Algebraic Manipulation Correction (AMC) codes. These codes can be used for correction of random errors and for detection of fault injection attacks. These codes can provide a guaranteed error detection probability for all errors even if both the user defined messages (data stored in the memory) and the error patterns are controllable by an attacker. The presented code can correct all single-bit errors in the information bits of the code. Moreover, these codes can be used to correct double-bit errors with high probabilities. The construction and the error correction procedures for the code will be described. The probability that an error can be successfully detected and/or corrected and the hardware overheads for the proposed memory architecture will be estimated. The presented approach is efficient for protecting security/reliability critical memories used to store the important information on the chip (e.g., a secret key in a cryptographic device). Keywords-Algebraic Manipulation Detection Code, Error Correction, Fault Injection Attack, Hardware Security