State-of-the-art of secure ECC implementations: a survey on known side-channel attacks and countermeasures

Abstract

Implementations of cryptographic primitives are vulnerable to physical attacks. While the adversary only needs to succeed in one out of many attack methods, the designers have to consider all the known attacks, whenever applicable to their system, simultaneously. Thus, keeping an organized, complete and up-to-date table of physical attacks and countermeasures is of paramount importance to system designers.This paper summarizes known physical attacks and countermeasures on Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems. Instead of repeating the details of different attacks, we focus on a systematic way of organizing and understanding known attacks and countermeasures. Three principles of selecting countermeasures to thwart multiple attacks are given. This paper can be used as a road map for countermeasure selection in a first design iteration.

A high-performance elliptic curve cryptographic coprocessor with side channel analysis countermeasures for smart IC card

“…Traditional power attack methods consist of Simple Power Attack (SPA), Differential Power Attack (DPA) and Template Attack (TA) [4]. SPA just needs one power trace.…”

“…Side channel analysis mainly includes power attack, fault attack (FA) and electromagnetic attack (EMA) [4], among which power attack is the most important. Power attack can derive the secret key utilizing power leakages of cryptosystems.…”

Residue Number System as a side channel and fault injection attack countermeasure in elliptic curve cryptography

“…Regarding DPA attacks, countermeasures are based on randomization during the SM process [11] [10] as adopted in Algorithm 1 (base point blinding, Coron second countermeasure). As long as point operations in SM rounds remain fully balanced (same point operations number per round, same point operations execution order per round for all rounds) and the random point R is not a weak mask (i.e.…”

“…Scalar multiplication (SM), the main mathematical operation behind Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is the target of a broad range of possible PAs and FAs on ECC [11] [15] of both horizontal and vertical nature [7]. RNS is an arithmetic representation that is advantageous when it comes to parallel arithmetic calculations and has considerable potentials as an PA/FA countermeasure [2] [4] [19] [16].…”

Single-Trace Side-Channel Attacks on Scalar Multiplications with Precomputations

“…Side-channel attacks on ECC have gained significant amounts of research interest [17,18]. We focus on passive attacks where an attacker only observes a cryptographic device under its normal operation.…”