Differential Attacks on Deterministic Signatures

Christopher Ambrose; Joppe W.  Bos; Björn Fay; Marc Joye; Manfred Lochter; Bruce Murray

Paper 2017/975

Differential Attacks on Deterministic Signatures

Christopher Ambrose, Joppe W. Bos, Björn Fay, Marc Joye, Manfred Lochter, and Bruce Murray

Abstract

Deterministic signature schemes are becoming more popular, as illustrated by the deterministic variant of ECDSA and the popular EdDSA scheme, since eliminating the need for high-quality randomness might have some advantages in certain use-cases. In this paper we outline a range of differential fault attacks and a differential power analysis attack against such deterministic schemes. This shows, contrary to some earlier works, that such signature schemes are not naturally protected against such advanced attacks. We discuss different countermeasures and propose to include entropy for low-cost protection against these attacks in scenarios where these attack vectors are a real threat: this does not require to change the key generation or the verification methods and results in a signature scheme which offers high performance and security for a wide range of use-cases.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: Public-key algorithms Elliptic curve cryptography Digital signatures Implementation attacks and defenses Hardware security
Contact author(s): joppe bos @ nxp com
History: 2017-10-10: revised; 2017-10-05: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2017/975
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/975,
      author = {Christopher Ambrose and Joppe W.  Bos and Björn Fay and Marc Joye and Manfred Lochter and Bruce Murray},
      title = {Differential Attacks on Deterministic Signatures},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/975},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/975}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/975}
}