Nano meets security: Exploring nanoelectronic devices for security applications

The survey paper on hardware for computer security by Rajendran et al. that immediately follows this prolog touches upon - albeit not explicitly - on two important trends in the evolution of electronic and networking technologies. The first of them is the rapidly dwindling dimensions of electronic components. The second is the utmost urgency with which hardware locks are needed for ensuring computer security and the strategic roles they play in national defense and our financial safety. It may thus be worthwhile to spend few moments on these two trends before we hand over the reader to the survey of the work that are being done on several types of such hardware components. Among the components that can fortify computer security there is a relatively new entrant known as the memristor (contraction of memory resistor). It can however be realized on a nanometeric scale (10^-9 of a meter) and it exhibits properties not encountered in other hardware elements hitherto. The combination of its small size and the special properties makes it a highly desirable candidate for use in security hardware. To comprehend the physical measurements of a memristor made to a scale of a billionth of a meter (a nanometer) we have to think of the comparable dimensions of a miniscule DNA strand in our own bodies. The tiny new player, theoretically conceived in 1971, 40 plus years later created at Hewlett Packard Research Labs, Palo Alto, Calif. and first publicly announced in 2008 in Nature, may soon change the established circuit design not only for security but for many other electronic circuits as well. It would thus be proper to briefly describe the concept and the operation of the memristor in this prolog.