Hardware Security based Quantum Dot Cellular Automata Circuit Design – Review and Outlook

Abstract

In recent scenario, CMOS technology plays a very important role in VLSI based IC technology which is a integration of logic models. The chips operations have shown an outstanding development in the decades. This increment of chips has relied on shrinking the transistor. In CMOS technology, the scaling process has led to severe challenges of power consumption, physical dimensions, and current leakages. Among the probable solutions, Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA) is known as the top promising technologies due to its potential applications in computational designs with appealing features like low power consumption, high speed operation and high device density. The QCA offers a better solutions for some circuit namely adders, multipliers, memories, cryptographic processors and nano communication devices etc. The results of physical hardware attacks are severer and recovery is difficult which the paper is interested to focus on hardware security. This paper discusses the several security challenges like Reverse engineering, gate level net list overbuilding and some of the attacks and their countermeasures based on circuits. Some of the secret key-based cryptographic methods challenges are secret key distribution, generation and more importantly securing these secret keys from physical attacks is the major problems. The Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are freshly used as a hopeful hardware security solution for identification and authentication of circuits. Hardware security has emerged with the several issues like piracy, counterfeiting, and side channel attacks. This paper gives the various methods that are presented by many researchers to secure the innovated design from the third party in CMOS technology. The paper is concluded with a need for research in security in QCA based circuit for hardware security in IC/IP.