Biblio

The core operation of all cryptosystems based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography is Elliptic Curve Point Multiplication. Depending on implementation it can be vulnerable to different Side Channel Analysis attacks exploiting information leakage, such as power consumption or execution time. Multiple countermeasures against these attacks have been developed over time, each having different impact on parameters of the cryptosystem. This paper summarizes popular countermeasures for simple and differential power analysis attacks on Elliptic Curve cryptosystems. Presented secure algorithms were implemented in Verilog hardware description language and synthesized to logic gates for power trace generation.

Energy efficiency and security is a critical requirement for computing at edge nodes. Unrolled architectures for lightweight cryptographic algorithms have been shown to be energy-efficient, providing higher performance while meeting resource constraints. Hardware implementations of unrolled datapaths have also been shown to be resistant to side channel analysis (SCA) attacks due to a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and an increased complexity in the leakage model. This paper demonstrates optimal leakage models and an improved CFA attack which makes it feasible to extract first-order side-channel leakages from combinational logic in the initial rounds of unrolled datapaths. Several leakage models, targeting initial rounds, are explored and 1-bit hamming weight (HW) based leakage model is shown to be an optimal choice. Additionally, multi-band narrow bandpass filtering techniques in conjunction with correlation frequency analysis (CFA) is demonstrated to improve SNR by up to 4×, attributed to the removal of the misalignment effect in combinational logics and signal isolation. The improved CFA attack is performed on side channel signatures acquired for 7-round unrolled SIMON datapaths, implemented on Sakura-G (XILINX spartan 6, 45nm) based FPGA platform and a 24× reduction in minimum-traces-to-disclose (MTD) for revealing 80% of the key bits is demonstrated with respect to conventional time domain correlation power analysis (CPA). Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to a fully-unrolled datapath for PRINCE and a parallel round-based datapath for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm to demonstrate its general applicability.