Energy and Side-channel Security Evaluation of Near-threshold Cryptographic Circuits in 28nm FD-SOI Technology

Abstract

This paper is the first to present an implementation of a cryptographic circuit in 28nm FD-SOI using near-threshold design. The implemented cipher, Ketje Jr, is a lightweight authenticated encryption algorithm. The energy consumption of representative authenticated encryption operations as well as the information leakage through the power consumption side-channel are evaluated. The results show that an ultra-low energy implementation can be achieved, and that the near-threshold design has little influence on the Signal to Noise Ratio in the power measurements of our chip.