Visible to the public Breaking a fully Balanced ASIC Coprocessor Implementing Complete Addition Formulas on Weierstrass Elliptic Curves

TitleBreaking a fully Balanced ASIC Coprocessor Implementing Complete Addition Formulas on Weierstrass Elliptic Curves
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsKabin, I., Dyka, Z., Klann, D., Mentens, N., Batina, L., Langendoerfer, P.
Conference Name2020 23rd Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD)
Keywordsapplication specific integrated circuits, Clocks, complete addition formulas, coprocessors, Elliptic curve cryptography, Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), Elliptic curves, fully balanced ASIC coprocessor, hardware accelerators, horizontal DPA attacks, horizontal SCA attacks, logic design, Metrics, Montgomery ladder, open-source designs, point addition, point doubling operations, pubcrawl, public key cryptography, random order execution, Registers, Resiliency, Scalability, side channel analysis (SCA) attacks, Weierstrass elliptic curves
AbstractIn this paper we report on the results of selected horizontal SCA attacks against two open-source designs that implement hardware accelerators for elliptic curve cryptography. Both designs use the complete addition formula to make the point addition and point doubling operations indistinguishable. One of the designs uses in addition means to randomize the operation sequence as a countermeasure. We used the comparison to the mean and an automated SPA to attack both designs. Despite all these countermeasures, we were able to extract the keys processed with a correctness of 100%.
DOI10.1109/DSD51259.2020.00051
Citation Keykabin_breaking_2020