Exploiting Emerging Reconfigurable Technologies for Secure Devices

Abstract

In the present work, we show how new and emerging reconfigurable technologies provide promising improvement over CMOS in the field of hardware security and encryption. We demonstrate how security features are a natural outcome of the circuits based on Silicon Nanowire reconfigurable transistors. This forms the basis of authentication key based security technique. Using the authentication key based system, we obtained the maximum possible key-length for MCNC benchmark circuits. Further, we formulated security as a tunable aspect for a circuit, by introducing don't care adjustment. A combination of the above two is used to establish security in terms of Shannon's entropy. We show that using the above concepts, Shannon's entropy increases for 99.1% benchmarks out of which maximum entropy is reached for 38.5% of all the benchmarks. We demonstrate these concepts using a case study for a 2-bit Ripple Carry Adder (RCA) based on SiNW RFETs and compare the design with its CMOS counterpart.