Paper 2011/283

The Fault Attack ECDLP Revisited

Mingqiang Wang and Xiaoyun Wang and Tao Zhan

Abstract

Biehl et al.\cite{BMM} proposed a fault-based attack on elliptic curve cryptography. In this paper, we refined the fault attack method. An elliptic curve $E$ is defined over prime field $\mathbb{F}_p$ with base point $P\in E(\mathbb{F}_p)$. Applying the fault attack on these curves, the discrete logarithm on the curve can be computed in subexponential time of $L_p(1/2, 1+o(1))$. The runtime bound relies on heuristics conjecture about smooth numbers similar to the ones used in \cite{Lens}.