Energy-efficient and secure S-Box circuit using symmetric pass gate adiabatic logic

Differential Power Analysis (DPA) attack is considered to be a main threat while designing cryptographic processors. In cryptographic algorithms like DES and AES, S-Box is used to indeterminate the relationship between the keys and the cipher texts. However, S-box is prone to DPA attack due to its high power consumption. In this paper, we are implementing an energy-efficient 8-bit S-Box circuit using our proposed Symmetric Pass Gate Adiabatic Logic (SPGAL). SPGAL is energy-efficient as compared to the existing DPA-resistant adiabatic and non-adiabatic logic families. SPGAL is energy-efficient due to reduction of non-adiabatic loss during the evaluate phase of the outputs. Further, the S-Box circuit implemented using SPGAL is resistant to DPA attacks. The results are verified through SPICE simulations in 180nm technology. SPICE simulations show that the SPGAL based S-Box circuit saves upto 92% and 67% of energy as compared to the conventional CMOS and Secured Quasi-Adiabatic Logic (SQAL) based S-Box circuit. From the simulation results, it is evident that the SPGAL based circuits are energy-efficient as compared to the existing DPA-resistant adiabatic and non-adiabatic logic families. In nutshell, SPGAL based gates can be used to build secure hardware for low power portable electronic devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) based electronic devices.