Congratulations! Chintan Chavda (PhD student)’s paper accepted at the HotStorage ’17 conference!

Our first-year PhD student, Mr. Chintan Chavda’s recent work on STT-MRAM for its hardware security application has been accepted for presentation in a premier international conference held in Santa Clara, CA on July 10-11, 2017 (HotStorage ’17, the 9th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems). His work investigates a possible vulnerability issue of access control memory that is used as a SSD write buffer, by performing various SEM (scanning electron microscope) studies of STT-MRAM bits. This is in line and following up with Dr. Junghee Lee (UTSA ECE faculty)’s previous work on access control memory (ACM), as it fully utilizes the emergent properties of STT-MRAM (namely, high speed, high endurance, and non-volatility) to use it as a write buffer to SSD “without encryption.” It is found that simple, non-destructive imaging attacks (such as SEM) are not able to reveal the information stored in STT-MRAM. The details will be presented and published shortly. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Junghee Lee, Dr. Youngjae Kim at Sogang University, South Korea, and Dr. Yu-Sheng Chen at ITRI, Taiwan. The picture is taken in the UTSA Kleberg Advanced Microscopy Center (KAMC) SEM laboratory, where Chintan is trying to get high-resolution SEM images of STT-MRAM cells under investigation.