An Efficient Countermeasure against Correlation Power-Analysis Attacks with Randomized Montgomery Operations for DF-ECC Processor

Abstract

Abstract. Correlation power-analysis (CPA) attacks are a serious threat for cryptographic device because the key can be disclosed from data-dependent power consumption. Hiding power consumption of encryption circuit can increase the security against CPA attacks, but it results in a large overhead for cost, speed, and energy dissipation. Masking processed data such as randomized scalar or primary base point on elliptic curve is another approach to prevent CPA attacks. However, these methods requiring pre-computed data are not suitable for hardware implementation of real-time applications. In this paper, a new CPA countermeasure performing all field operations in a randomized Montgomery domain is proposed to eliminate the correlation between target and reference power traces. After implemented in 90-nm CMOS process, our protected 521-bit dual-field elliptic curve cryptographic (DF-ECC) processor can perform one elliptic curve scalar multiplication (ECSM) in 4.57ms over GF (p 521 ) and 2.77ms over GF (2 409 ) with 3.6% area and 3.8% power overhead. Experiments from an FPGA evaluation board demonstrate that the private key of unprotected device will be revealed within 10 3 power traces, whereas the same attacks on our proposal cannot successfully extract the key value even after 10 6 measurements.

Design of a secure architecture for scalar multiplication on elliptic curves

“…Many implementations of ECC processors choose the Montgomery ladder algorithm to compute the scalar multiplication because it is safe against SPA and timing analysis attacks [11] [12]. On the other hand, DPA attacks [5] succeed against this algorithm.…”

“…On the other hand, DPA attacks [5] succeed against this algorithm. The DPA attacks can be made more difficult by field operations with random computation to obtain representations of the points in a random Montgomery domain [12]. Our countermeasure is at the algorithm level and can be mixed with random representations of points.…”

Side-Channel Attacks and Countermeasures for Identity-Based Cryptographic Algorithm SM9

“…For multibits fault, the only difference Usually, attackers can reveal the 256-bit by enabling the device to execute twice and comparing the two different results by our fault attack. [25][26][27]; they are as follows.…”

Side-Channel Analysis of Montgomery’s Representation Randomization

“…Our work. In this paper, we show that the countermeasure proposed in [26] is flawed and can be efficiently broken by first-order CPA, even in presence of a large amount of noise in the measurements. After a presentation of the techniques proposed by Lee et al in Sect.…”

“…In practice, masking is always applied (possibly combined with hiding) since it provides strong security guaranty. Recently, Lee et al [26] proposed a new efficient countermeasure to overcome first-order CPA 2 attacks. It assumes that the field operations are performed in the Montgomery domain [30] and consists in randomizing the Montgomery representation of the internal results (thus defining a so-called Randomized Montgomery Domain).…”