Twist Insecurity

Several authors suggest that the use of twist secure Elliptic Curves automatically leads to secure implementations. We argue that even for twist secure curves a point validation has to be performed. We illustrate this with examples where the security of EC-algorithms is strongly degraded, even for twist secure curves. We show that the usual blindig countermeasures against SCA are insufficient (actually they introduce weaknesses) if no point validation is performed, or if an attacker has access to certain intermediate points. In this case the overall security of the system is reduced to the length of the blinding parameter. We emphazise that our methods work even in the case of a very high identification error rate during the SCA-phase

A versatile Montgomery multiplier architecture with characteristic three support

We present a novel unified core design which is extended to realize Montgomery multiplication in the fields GF(2n), GF(3m), and GF(p). Our unified design supports RSA and elliptic curve schemes, as well as the identity-based encryption which requires a pairing computation on an elliptic curve. The architecture is pipelined and is highly scalable. The unified core utilizes the redundant signed digit representation to reduce the critical path delay. While the carry-save representation used in classical unified architectures is only good for addition and multiplication operations, the redundant signed digit representation also facilitates efficient computation of comparison and subtraction operations besides addition and multiplication. Thus, there is no need for a transformation between the redundant and the non-redundant representations of field elements, which would be required in the classical unified architectures to realize the subtraction and comparison operations. We also quantify the benefits of the unified architectures in terms of area and critical path delay. We provide detailed implementation results. The metric shows that the new unified architecture provides an improvement over a hypothetical non-unified architecture of at least 24.88%, while the improvement over a classical unified architecture is at least 32.07%

Parallelizing GF(P) Elliptic Curve Cryptography Computations for Security and Speed

The elliptic curve cryptography can be observed as two levels of computations, upper scalar multiplication level and lower point operations level. We combine the inherited parallelism in both levels to reduce the delay and improve security against the simple power attack. The best security and speed performance is achieved when parallelizing the computation to eight parallel multiplication operations. This strategy is worth considering since it shows very attractive performance conclusions

Parallelizing GF(P) Elliptic Curve Cryptography Computations for Security and Speed

The elliptic curve cryptography can be observed as two levels of computations, upper scalar multiplication level and lower point operations level. We combine the inherited parallelism in both levels to reduce the delay and improve security against the simple power attack. The best security and speed performance is achieved when parallelizing the computation to eight parallel multiplication operations. This strategy is worth considering since it shows very attractive performance conclusions

SCA security verification on wireless sensor network node

Side Channel Attack (SCA) differs from traditional mathematic attacks. It gets around of the exhaustive mathematic calculation and precisely pin to certain points in the cryptographic algorithm to reveal confidential information from the running crypto-devices. Since the introduction of SCA by Paul Kocher et al [1], it has been considered to be one of the most critical threats to the resource restricted but security demanding applications, such as wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we focus our work on the SCA-concerned security verification on WSN (wireless sensor network). A detailed setup of the platform and an analysis of the results of DPA (power attack) and EMA (electromagnetic attack) is presented. The setup follows the way of low-cost setup to make effective SCAs. Meanwhile, surveying the weaknesses of WSNs in resisting SCA attacks, especially for the EM attack. Finally, SCA-Prevention suggestions based on Differential Security Strategy for the FPGA hardware implementation in WSN will be given, helping to get an improved compromise between security and cost

Circuit-Variant Moving Target Defense for Side-Channel Attacks on Reconfigurable Hardware

With the emergence of side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks, bits of a secret key may be derived by correlating key values with physical properties of cryptographic process execution. Power and Electromagnetic (EM) analysis attacks are based on the principle that current flow within a cryptographic device is key-dependent and therefore, the resulting power consumption and EM emanations during encryption and/or decryption can be correlated to secret key values. These side-channel attacks require several measurements of the target process in order to amplify the signal of interest, filter out noise, and derive the secret key through statistical analysis methods. Differential power and EM analysis attacks rely on correlating actual side-channel measurements to hypothetical models. This research proposes increasing resistance to differential power and EM analysis attacks through structural and spatial randomization of an implementation. By introducing randomly located circuit variants of encryption components, the proposed moving target defense aims to disrupt side-channel collection and correlation needed to successfully implement an attac

A New Exponentiation Algorithm Resistant to Combined Side Channel Attack

Abstract Since two different types of side channel attacks based on passive information leakage and active fault injection are independently considered as implementation threats on cryptographic modules, most countermeasures have been separately developed according to each attack type. But then, Amiel et al. proposed a combined side channel attack in which an attacker combines these two methods to recover the secret key in an RSA implementation. In this paper, we show that the BNP (Boscher, Naciri, and Prouff) algorithm for RSA, which is an SPA/FA-resistant exponentiation method, is also vulnerable to the combined attack. In addition, we propose a new exponentiation algorithm resistant to power analysis and fault attack as well as the combined attack. The proposed secure exponentiation algorithm can be employed to strengthen the security of CRT-RSA