A Novel SPA Attack on ECC Using MMM's Conditional Subtraction

DOI

10.2991/iset-15.2015.33How to use a DOI?

Keywords

ECC, Cryptography, SPA, Montgomery modular multiplication

Abstract

Elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECCs) are becoming more popular because of the reduced number of key bits required in comparison to other cryptosystems such as RSA. They are especially suited to smartcards because of the limited memory and computational power available on these devices. However, the side-channel attacks especially simple side-channel analysis (SPA) can obtain information about the cryptosystem by measuring power consumption and processing time. To resist this attack there appear a number of countermeasures and the most widely used methods are Montgomery ladder and double-and-add-always algorithm. This paper proposes a novel simple power analysis attack to these countermeasures. Experimental results on smart cards demonstrate that this attack method can retrieve secret keys by distinguishing the conditional subtraction of Montgomery modular multiplication (MMM). Several countermeasures that can resist this kind of SPA attack are also demonstrated in this paper.

Copyright

© 2015, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Lihui Wang
AU  - Qing Li
AU  - Zhimin Zhang
AU  - Weijun Shan
AU  - Davidwei Zhang
PY  - 2015/03
DA  - 2015/03
TI  - A Novel SPA Attack on ECC Using MMM's Conditional Subtraction
BT  - Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information Science and Electronic Technology
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 129
EP  - 132
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iset-15.2015.33
DO  - 10.2991/iset-15.2015.33
ID  - Wang2015/03
ER  -