Paper 2017/629

A Systematic Approach to the Side-Channel Analysis of ECC Implementations with Worst-Case Horizontal Attacks

Romain Poussier, Yuanyuan Zhou, and François-Xavier Standaert

Abstract

The wide number and variety of side-channel attacks against scalar multiplication algorithms makes their security evaluations complex, in particular in case of time constraints making exhaustive analyses impossible. In this paper, we present a systematic way to evaluate the security of such implementations against horizontal attacks. As horizontal attacks allow extracting most of the information in the leakage traces of scalar multiplications, they are suitable to avoid risks of overestimated security levels. For this purpose, we additionally propose to use linear regression in order to accurately characterize the leakage function and therefore approach worst-case security evaluations. We then show how to apply our tools in the contexts of ECDSA and ECDH implementations, and validate them against two targets: a Cortex-M4 and a Cortex-A8 micro-controllers.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
A minor revision of an IACR publication in CHES 2017
Keywords
side-channelelliptic curvesscalar multiplicationshorizontal attacksworst case
Contact author(s)
romain poussier @ uclouvain be
History
2017-06-27: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/629
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/629,
      author = {Romain Poussier and Yuanyuan Zhou and François-Xavier Standaert},
      title = {A Systematic Approach to the Side-Channel Analysis of ECC Implementations with Worst-Case Horizontal Attacks},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/629},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/629}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/629}
}
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