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 algorithmsElliptic curve cryptographyDigital signaturesImplementation attacks and defensesHardware 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
Creative Commons Attribution
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},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/975}
}
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