Non-volatile memories (NVMs) have the potential to reshape next-generation
memory systems because of their promising properties of near-zero leakage power
consumption, high density and non-volatility. However, NVMs also face critical
security threats that exploit the non-volatile property. Compared to volatile
memory, the capability of retaining data even after power down makes NVM more
vulnerable. Existing solutions to address the security issues of NVMs are
mainly based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which incurs significant
performance and power overhead. In this paper, we propose a lightweight memory
encryption/decryption scheme by exploiting in-situ memory operations with
negligible overhead. To validate the feasibility of the encryption/decryption
scheme, device-level and array-level experiments are performed using
ferroelectric field effect transistor (FeFET) as an example NVM without loss of
generality. Besides, a comprehensive evaluation is performed on a 128x128 FeFET
AND-type memory array in terms of area, latency, power and throughput. Compared
with the AES-based scheme, our scheme shows around 22.6x/14.1x increase in
encryption/decryption throughput with negligible power penalty. Furthermore, we
evaluate the performance of our scheme over the AES-based scheme when deploying
different neural network workloads. Our scheme yields significant latency
reduction by 90% on average for encryption and decryption processes