Tamper-Resistant Arithmetic for Public-Key Cryptography

Cryptographic hardware has found many uses in many ubiquitous and pervasive security devices with a small form factor, e.g. SIM cards, smart cards, electronic security tokens, and soon even RFIDs. With applications in banking, telecommunication, healthcare, e-commerce and entertainment, these devices use cryptography to provide security services like authentication, identification and confidentiality to the user. However, the widespread adoption of these devices into the mass market, and the lack of a physical security perimeter have increased the risk of theft, reverse engineering, and cloning. Despite the use of strong cryptographic algorithms, these devices often succumb to powerful side-channel attacks. These attacks provide a motivated third party with access to the inner workings of the device and therefore the opportunity to circumvent the protection of the cryptographic envelope. Apart from passive side-channel analysis, which has been the subject of intense research for over a decade, active tampering attacks like fault analysis have recently gained increased attention from the academic and industrial research community. In this dissertation we address the question of how to protect cryptographic devices against this kind of attacks. More specifically, we focus our attention on public key algorithms like elliptic curve cryptography and their underlying arithmetic structure. In our research we address challenges such as the cost of implementation, the level of protection, and the error model in an adversarial situation. The approaches that we investigated all apply concepts from coding theory, in particular the theory of cyclic codes. This seems intuitive, since both public key cryptography and cyclic codes share finite field arithmetic as a common foundation. The major contributions of our research are (a) a generalization of cyclic codes that allow embedding of finite fields into redundant rings under a ring homomorphism, (b) a new family of non-linear arithmetic residue codes with very high error detection probability, (c) a set of new low-cost arithmetic primitives for optimal extension field arithmetic based on robust codes, and (d) design techniques for tamper resilient finite state machines

New Assumptions and Efficient Cryptosystems from the ee-th Power Residue Symbol

The $e$-th power residue symbol $\left(\frac{\alpha}{\mathfrak{p}}\right)_e$ is a useful mathematical tool in cryptography, where $\alpha$ is an integer, $\mathfrak{p}$ is a prime ideal in the prime factorization of $p\mathbb{Z}[\zeta_e]$ with a large prime $p$ satisfying $e \mid p-1$, and $\zeta_e$ is an $e$-th primitive root of unity. One famous case of the $e$-th power symbol is the first semantic secure public key cryptosystem due to Goldwasser and Micali (at STOC 1982). In this paper, we revisit the $e$-th power residue symbol and its applications. In particular, we prove that computing the $e$-th power residue symbol is equivalent to solving the discrete logarithm problem. By this result, we give a natural extension of the Goldwasser-Micali cryptosystem, where $e$ is an integer only containing small prime factors. Compared to another extension of the Goldwasser-Micali cryptosystem due to Joye and Libert (at EUROCRYPT 2013), our proposal is more efficient in terms of bandwidth utilization and decryption cost. With a new complexity assumption naturally extended from the one used in the Goldwasser-Micali cryptosystem, our proposal is provable IND-CPA secure. Furthermore, we show that our results on the $e$-th power residue symbol can also be used to construct lossy trapdoor functions and circular and leakage resilient public key encryptions with more efficiency and better bandwidth utilization

An algorithmic and architectural study on Montgomery exponentiation in RNS

The modular exponentiation on large numbers is computationally intensive. An effective way for performing this operation consists in using Montgomery exponentiation in the Residue Number System (RNS). This paper presents an algorithmic and architectural study of such exponentiation approach. From the algorithmic point of view, new and state-of-the-art opportunities that come from the reorganization of operations and precomputations are considered. From the architectural perspective, the design opportunities offered by well-known computer arithmetic techniques are studied, with the aim of developing an efficient arithmetic cell architecture. Furthermore, since the use of efficient RNS bases with a low Hamming weight are being considered with ever more interest, four additional cell architectures specifically tailored to these bases are developed and the tradeoff between benefits and drawbacks is carefully explored. An overall comparison among all the considered algorithmic approaches and cell architectures is presented, with the aim of providing the reader with an extensive overview of the Montgomery exponentiation opportunities in RNS

Threshold Cryptosystems Based on 2k2^k-th Power Residue Symbols

In this paper we introduce a novel version of the Joye-Libert cryptosystem that allows users to decrypt without knowing the factorisation of the composite modulus. Then we use our construction as a building block for a threshold decryption protocol of the homomorphic Joye-Libert encryption scheme. Finally, we present several extensions of the threshold cryptosystem

A New Generalisation of the Goldwasser-Micali Cryptosystem Based on the Gap 2k2^k-Residuosity Assumption

We present a novel public key encryption scheme that enables users to exchange many bits messages by means of \emph{at least} two large prime numbers in a Goldwasser-Micali manner. Our cryptosystem is in fact a generalization of the Joye-Libert scheme (being itself an abstraction of the first probabilistic encryption scheme). We prove the security of the proposed cryptosystem in the standard model (based on the gap $2^k$-residuosity assumption) and report complexity related facts. We also describe an application of our scheme to biometric authentication and discuss the security of our suggested protocol. Last but not least, we indicate several promising research directions

The Case of Small Prime Numbers Versus the Joye-Libert Cryptosystem

In this paper we study the effect of using small prime numbers within the Joye-Libert public key encryption scheme. We introduce two novel versions and prove their security. We further show how to choose the system\u27s parameters such that the security results hold. Moreover, we provide a practical comparison between the cryptographic algorithms we introduced and the original Joye-Libert cryptosystem

A high-speed integrated circuit with applications to RSA Cryptography

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/833 on 01.02.2017 by CS (TIS)The rapid growth in the use of computers and networks in government, commercial and private communications systems has led to an increasing need for these systems to be secure against unauthorised access and eavesdropping. To this end, modern computer security systems employ public-key ciphers, of which probably the most well known is the RSA ciphersystem, to provide both secrecy and authentication facilities. The basic RSA cryptographic operation is a modular exponentiation where the modulus and exponent are integers typically greater than 500 bits long. Therefore, to obtain reasonable encryption rates using the RSA cipher requires that it be implemented in hardware. This thesis presents the design of a high-performance VLSI device, called the WHiSpER chip, that can perform the modular exponentiations required by the RSA cryptosystem for moduli and exponents up to 506 bits long. The design has an expected throughput in excess of 64kbit/s making it attractive for use both as a general RSA processor within the security function provider of a security system, and for direct use on moderate-speed public communication networks such as ISDN. The thesis investigates the low-level techniques used for implementing high-speed arithmetic hardware in general, and reviews the methods used by designers of existing modular multiplication/exponentiation circuits with respect to circuit speed and efficiency. A new modular multiplication algorithm, MMDDAMMM, based on Montgomery arithmetic, together with an efficient multiplier architecture, are proposed that remove the speed bottleneck of previous designs. Finally, the implementation of the new algorithm and architecture within the WHiSpER chip is detailed, along with a discussion of the application of the chip to ciphering and key generation