Energy Efficient and Side-Channel Secure Cryptographic Hardware for IoT-Edge Nodes

Abstract

Design of ultralightweight but secure encryption engine is a key challenge for Internet-of-Things edge devices. This paper explores the system level design space for an ultralow power image sensor node for secure communication and proposes an optimized datapath architecture for 128-bit SIMON (SIMON128), a lightweight block cipher, for minimal performance, power, and area overheads with increased level of side-channel security. Various datapath architectures for SIMON are explored for simultaneously increasing energy-efficiency and resistance to power-based side-channel analysis (PSCA) attacks. Alternative datapath architectures are implemented on ASIC (15 nm CMOS) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) (Spartan-6, 45 nm) to perform power, performance, and area analysis. We show that, although a bitserial datapath minimizes area and power, a round unrolled datapath provides $80{\times }$ higher energy-efficiency and $143{\times }$ higher performance, compared to the baseline bitserial design. Moreover, the PSCA measurements performed using Sakura-G board with Spartan-6 FPGA, demonstrate that a 6-round unrolled datapath improves minimum-traces-to-disclosure for correlation power analysis (CPA) by at least $384{\times }$ over baseline bitserial design with no successful CPA even with 500 000 measurements. Finally, application to the image-sensor node demonstrates that optimized unrolled SIMON128 can provide equivalent performance to AES128 at lower area, higher energy efficiency, and improved side channel security.