An efficient countermeasure against power attacks for ECC over GF(p)

Power attacks are serious threats to cryptographic devices, and most countermeasures against power attacks result in a large time overhead for hardware implementation. This work presents an efficient countermeasure against power attacks for elliptic curve cryptography over GF(p). The proposed algori...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2014 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) pp. 814 - 817
Main Authors Jheng-Hao Ye, Szu-Han Huang, Ming-Der Shieh
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.06.2014
Subjects
Algorithm design and analysis
Elliptic curve cryptography
Elliptic curves
Hardware
Power demand
Resistance
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Summary:Power attacks are serious threats to cryptographic devices, and most countermeasures against power attacks result in a large time overhead for hardware implementation. This work presents an efficient countermeasure against power attacks for elliptic curve cryptography over GF(p). The proposed algorithm adopts the Montgomery ladder scalar multiplication algorithm as a basic framework to protect SPA. Then, a new scheme is presented to effectively manipulate the key so as to reduce the resulting time overhead for preventing differential power attack (DPA) and zero power attack (ZPA). Particularly, the base point blinding technique and half key splitting scheme are used to protect the upper and the lower halves of the key, respectively. Experimental results show the proposed countermeasure exhibit a time advantage over related works. Compared to other countermeasures against SPA, DPA, and ZPA, the proposed one can achieve up to 15% time improvement for accomplishing one 160-bit GF(p) scalar multiplication.
ISSN:0271-4302
2158-1525
DOI:10.1109/ISCAS.2014.6865260