International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR)
Abstract
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is an efficient public cryptosystem with
a short key size. For this reason it is suitable for implementing on memory-constraint
devices such as smart cards, mobile devices, etc. However, these devices leak information
about their private key through side channels (power consumption, electromagnetic
radiation, timing etc) during cryptographic processing. In this paper we have examined
countermeasures against a specific class of side channel attacks (power analysis) called
Zero-Value Point Attack (ZVP), using elliptic curve isomorphism and isogeny. We found
that these methods are an efficient way of securing cryptographic devices using ECC
against ZVP attack. Our main contribution is to extend the work of Akishita and Takagi
[3,2] to binary fields. We also provide a more detail analysis of the ZVP attack over
prime fields