WSEAS Transactions on Computers
Print ISSN: 1109-2750, E-ISSN: 2224-2872
Volume 14, 2017
Efficiently Secure ECC Scalar Multiplication Methods Against Power Analysis Attacks on Resource Constrained Devices
Authors: Turki F. Alsomani, Hilal Houssain
Abstract: Power analysis attacks are serious security threats to most cryptographic implementations, where these attacks may reveal the secret keys by exploiting leaked power consumption from running cryptographic devices. Most of the research efforts and proposed countermeasures against these attacks result in additional computational cost for hardware implementation. This paper presents efficient scalar multiplication methods, which is secure against the simple power analysis attacks. The main idea of the proposed method is to delay the elliptic curve point addition operation of the scalar multiplication using buffering technique. By such delay, the correlation between the key and the power consumption is eliminated. In addition, when combined with randomization techniques, the second method may also protect against differential power analysis attacks. Accordingly, the proposed methods have been implemented on an Altera Cyclone III EP3C80F780C7 FPGA and the results show that the proposed methods exhibit a time advantage over related works. Compared to other methods, the proposed methods can achieve up to 50% time improvement for accomplishing one scalar multiplication with 173-bit, 191-bit, and 230-bit.
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Keywords: Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems, Simple Power Analysis attacks, Differential Power Analysis Attacks, Scalar Multiplication
Pages: 241-251
WSEAS Transactions on Computers, ISSN / E-ISSN: 1109-2750 / 2224-2872, Volume 14, 2017, Art. #28