Low-Power and Secure Lightweight Cryptography Via TFET-Based Energy Recovery Circuits

Abstract

Lightweight cryptography (LWC) provides cryptographic solutions for resource-constrained devices such as RFID tags, industrial controllers, sensor nodes, and smart cards. LWC based devices have stringent constraints on power consumption and are vulnerable to side-channel attacks such as Differential Power Analysis (DPA). The existing CMOS-based countermeasures for DPA are not suitable for circuits working under power constraints. Energy recovery logic is a promising computing paradigm for designing low-power and DPA-resistant hardware. Further, it has been proven that emerging transistors could help mitigate DPA attacks while consuming low power. This work investigates the utility of emerging Tunnel FET (TFET) transistors in the energy recovery circuits to design low-power and DPA resistant LWC circuits. The PRESENT-80 LWC algorithm is used as a benchmark circuit. The PRESENT-80 algorithm is implemented using TFET based Symmetric Pass Gate Adiabatic Logic (TunSAL). SPICE simulations at 12.5 MHz validated that one round of PRESENT-80 implemented using TunSAL has power saving of 62% and 28% in comparison to CMOS-SPGAL and FinFET-SPGAL (FinSAL), respectively. The security of TunSAL based PRESENT-80 has been evaluated by performing a DPA attack through SPICE simulations. We proved that PRESENT-80 algorithm implemented using TunSAL is resistant to DPA attacks.