SEAL-RF: Secure Adiabatic Logic for Wirelessly Powered IoT Devices

Wireless power harvesting has become popular for various Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based devices, such as wireless sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID)-based systems, and implantable devices for healthcare. Since these ubiquitous computing devices are likely to handle confidential information, ensuring their security is critical. In this work, a secure adiabatic logic family, referred to as SEAL-RF, is developed, specifically for RF-powered IoT devices. SEAL-RF is highly energy efficient and resistant against power-based side-channel attacks. Specifically, at the gate-level, the normalized energy deviation (NED) of SEAL-RF is up to 180 × lower than conventional (unprotected) adiabatic logic, while consuming up to 39% less average energy per transition. Furthermore, the NED of SEAL-RF is up to 5.5 × lower than an existing secure adiabatic logic, while consuming up to 32% less average energy per transition. A lightweight encryption core based on SIMON algorithm is also designed with the proposed SEAL-RF and conventional adiabatic logic. A correlation power analysis (CPA)-based side-channel attack is mounted on both designs. The secret key for the unprotected SIMON core is retrieved with less than 800 traces whereas the secret key for the SEAL-RF-based SIMON core cannot be retrieved with more than 40K traces. Furthermore, the average power and energy per encryption of the SEAL-RF-based SIMON core is 15.6% lower than the conventional adiabatic logic-based SIMON.