QCA Implementation of Serpent Block Cipher

Abstract

Quantum cellular automata (QCA) represents an emerging technology at the nanotechnology level. Because of high speed, nanoscale size and ultra low power nature of QCA, cryptography can be an interesting application of QCA technology. QCA implementation of the Serpent block cipher is discussed in this paper. The basic modules of Serpent are implemented using QCA cells. It can be obviously seen that the implementation of cryptographic algorithms in this technology has considerable advantages compared to conventional CMOS approach.