Volatile threshold switching devices for hardware security primitives: Exploiting intrinsic variability as an entropy source

Abstract

In the age of the Internet of Things, the proliferation of edge devices has resulted in a significant increase in personal information that is susceptible to theft and counterfeiting at various stages of data communication. As a result, substantial attention has been focused on hardware (HW) security elements, such as the true random number generator and physical unclonable function. With the recent surge in research and development of emerging memristors, which exploit the inherent variability of these devices, there has been a notable increase in studies on HW security. Particularly, volatile threshold switch (TS) devices, which exhibit insulator/metal characteristics below/above a certain threshold voltage, show great promise as security devices due to their lower power consumption and higher cycling endurance compared to nonvolatile memory devices. Despite the promising attributes and increasing demand for TS devices for HW security, there remains a lack of a comprehensive overview covering various TS devices and their potential contributions to HW privacy. To address this gap, this review provides an encompassing analysis of different types of TS devices and their performance in HW security literature, providing insight into current limitations and the future prospects of HW security primitives based on TS devices.