Differential Fault Attack on Montgomery Ladder and in the Presence of Scalar Randomization

Abstract

Differential fault attacks are powerful techniques to break a cryptographic primitive, where the adversary disrupts the execution of a calculation to find a secret key. Those attacks have been applied in Elliptic Curve Cryptography under various types of faults, and there exists several protection mechanisms to prevent them.In this paper, we present a new differential fault attack on the Montgomery ladder algorithm for scalar multiplication. We further present that such attacks can be applied when specific point additions formulas are used and when different scalar blinding techniques to randomize the computation are present.