ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses memristors and memristor-based hardware security primitives. A memristor is a two-terminal nonvolatile memory component. Progress in memristor-based systems research has poised memristors as a promising solution for low-power and high-density nonvolatile storage. The linear ion-drift model provides a simple explanation of the transport mechanism in a memristor. There have been several potential memristor-based Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) designs in the current literature with different use case and attack models. Memristor-based crossbars are used for designing one of the first memristor-based PUFs called nano-PPUF. The high density of the memristor crossbars makes memristors an ideal candidate for a Super-High Information Content (SHIC)-PUF. PUFs are hardware-dependent security primitives that harness physical variation of a silicon chip to generate unique chip-dependent challenge–response pairs. Random number generators are an essential primitive of common security protocols. Security analysis of chaos-based secure communication protocols needs to be properly addressed by the cryptographic community before validating their application.
