Nanoscale cryptography: opportunities and challenges

While most of the electronics industry is dependent on the ever-decreasing size of lithographic transistors, this scaling cannot continue indefinitely. To improve the performance of the integrated circuits, new emerging and paradigms are needed. In recent years, nanoelectronics has become one of the most important and exciting forefront in science and engineering. It shows a great promise for providing us in the near future with many breakthroughs that change the direction of technological advances in a wide range of applications. In this paper, we discuss the contribution that nanotechnology may offer to the evolution of cryptographic hardware and embedded systems and demonstrate how nanoscale devices can be used for constructing security primitives. Using a custom set of design automation tools, it is demonstrated that relative to a conventional 45-nm CMOS system, performance gains can be obtained up to two orders of magnitude reduction in area and up to 50 % improvement in speed.