Highly secure cryptographic computations against side-channel attacks

Side channel attacks (SCAs) have been considered as great threats to modern cryptosystems, including RSA and elliptic curve public key cryptosystems. This is because the main computations involved in these systems, as the Modular Exponentiation (ME) in RSA and scalar multiplication (SM) in elliptic curve system, are potentially vulnerable to SCAs. Montgomery Powering Ladder (MPL) has been shown to be a good choice for ME and SM with counter-measures against certain side-channel attacks. However, recent research shows that MPL is still vulnerable to some advanced attacks [21, 30 and 34]. In this thesis, an improved sequence masking technique is proposed to enhance the MPL\u27s resistance towards Differential Power Analysis (DPA). Based on the new technique, a modified MPL with countermeasure in both data and computation sequence is developed and presented. Two efficient hardware architectures for original MPL algorithm are also presented by using binary and radix-4 representations, respectively

Differential power and electromagnetic attacks on a FPGA implementation of elliptic curve cryptosystems

This paper describes the first differential power and electromagnetic analysis attacks performed on a hardware implementation of an elliptic curve cryptosystem. In the same time we also compared the metrics used in differential power and electromagnetic radiation attacks. We describe the use of the Pearson correlation coefficient, the distance of mean test and the maximum likelihood test. For each metric the number of measurements needed to get a clear idea of the right guess of the key-bit is taken as indication of the strength of the metric. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.status: publishe