Novel Reversible Design of Advanced Encryption Standard Cryptographic Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The quantum of power consumption in wireless sensor nodes plays a vital role in power management since more number of functional elements are integrated in a smaller space and operated at very high frequencies. In addition, the variations in the power consumption pave the way for power analysis attacks in which the attacker gains control of the secret parameters involved in the cryptographic implementation embedded in the wireless sensor nodes. Hence, a strong countermeasure is required to provide adequate security in these systems. Traditional digital logic gates are used to build the circuits in wireless sensor nodes and the primary reason for its power consumption is the absence of reversibility property in those gates. These irreversible logic gates consume power as heat due to the loss of per bit information. In order to minimize the power consumption and in turn to circumvent the issues related to power analysis attacks, reversible logic gates can be used in wireless sensor nodes. This shifts the focus from power-hungry irreversible gates to potentially powerful circuits based on controllable quantum systems. Reversible logic gates theoretically consume zero power and have accurate quantum circuit model for practical realization such as quantum computers and implementations based on quantum dot cellular automata. One of the key components in wireless sensor nodes is the cryptographic algorithm implementation which is used to secure the information collected by the sensor nodes. In this work, a novel reversible gate design of 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic algorithm is presented. The complete structure of AES algorithm is designed by using combinational logic circuits and further they are mapped to reversible logic circuits. The proposed architectures make use of Toffoli family of reversible gates. The performance metrics such as gate count and quantum cost of the proposed designs are rigorously analyzed with respect to the existing designs and are properly tabulated. Our proposed reversible design of AES algorithm shows considerable improvements in the performance metrics when compared to existing designs.