Power Attack Using Chosen Message against Elliptic Scalar Multiplication

Kouichi ITOH  Dai YAMAMOTO  Kazuyoshi FURUKAWA  Tetsuya IZU  Masahiko TAKENAKA  Naoya TORII 

Publication
A - Abstracts of IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences (Japanese Edition)  Vol.J95-A  No.5  pp.446-455
Publication Date: 2012/05/01
Online ISSN: 1881-0195
Print ISSN: 0913-5707
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Implementation Technologies for Cryptography and Information Security)
Category: 
Keyword: 
elliptic curve cyrptography,  side-channel attack,  power analysis, 

Full Text(in Japanese): PDF(568.9KB)

Summary: 
In this paper, we propose a new side-channel attack which can be applied to the cryptographic device provides an elliptic scalar-multiplication function. Our attack assumes the cryptographic device implements the elliptic addition and doubling calculation procedure defined in IEEE 1363-2000 standard. In the standard, a special branch code is executed if the input or output point is infinite point. In this paper, we propose an attack to reveal the private scalar value of scalar-multiplication by monitoring the execution of special branch code from the power trace. The proposed method is effective even when the device implements some countermeasures, scalar value randomization techniques with multiplication or division, and data randomization techniques with randomized coordinate projection technique.