A Comprehensive Evaluation of Integrated Circuits Side-Channel Resilience Utilizing Three-Independent-Gate Silicon Nanowire Field Effect Transistors-Based Current Mode Logic

Abstract

Side-channel attack (SCA) is one of the physical attacks, which will reveal the confidential information from cryptographic circuits by statistically analyzing physical manifestations. Various circuit-level countermeasures have been proposed as fundamental solutions to eliminate the correlations between side-channel information and circuit’s internal operations. The existing solutions, however, will introduce nonnegligible power and area overheads, making them difficult to be deployed in resource-constrained applications. In this article, a novel three-independent-gate silicon nanowire field effect transistor (TIGFET) with the intrinsic SCA-resilience characteristics is introduced to balance the tradeoffs among cost, performance, and security of cryptographic implementations. We construct six TIGFET-based current mode logic (CML) gates that can retain lower power variation under all possible transitions compared to the CMOS counterparts. As a proof of concept, advanced encryption standard (AES), SM4 block cipher algorithm (SM4), and lightweight cryptographic algorithm PRESENT are implemented utilizing the TIGFET-based CML gates. Correlation power attack is performed to evaluate the improvement of SCA resilience. Simulation results verify that the TIGFET-based cryptographic implementations decrease 42.37% area usage, lower 61.16% energy efficiency, reduce <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5.35\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> power variation, and achieve a similar level of SCA resistance compared to the CMOS counterpart, which is applicable for the resource-constrained applications.