Low-power and secure lightweight cryptography via tfet-based energy recovery circuits

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 lowpower 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.