User Authentication Based on Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata Using Reversible Logic for Secure Nanocommunication

© 2015, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals. QCA is a new nanodevice to achieve logic circuit at nanoscale level. User authentication is a key issue in nanocommunication, to allow only authorized user to access data. Excessive heat dissipation of irreversible process caused the circuitry bound of CMOS-based circuit. Reversible logic is an alternative to these problems. Reversible circuits have very low heat energy dissipation which is ideally zero. This paper illustrates an optimized design of Fredkin gate using QCA. The proposed Fredkin gate has outshined the existing circuits in terms of area, cell count, and latency. The design of reversible user password authenticator circuit has been explored based on Fredkin gate. The quantum cost of this authenticator circuit is five. For the first time, QCA layout of proposed user authenticator is also achieved in this paper. The quantum cost of QCA-based authenticator circuit is 0.041. All the QCA circuits are precise in terms of QCA cell, device density, and clocking zones, i.e., latency. Theoretical values are compared with simulation results that justify the design accuracy of the proposed circuits. The computational functionality of the circuit under thermal randomness is estimated which establishes the stability of the proposed circuit. The estimation of energy dissipation proves that the proposed circuit dissipates very low energy. To achieve low-power nanoscale authenticator circuit, QCA is used to implement the reversible logic.