Breaking a fully Balanced ASIC Coprocessor Implementing Complete Addition Formulas on Weierstrass Elliptic Curves

Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD), pp. 270–276

Abstract

In 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%.

Authors 6

1. Ievgen Kabin

   Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics

   Affiliation as printed

   IHP – Leibniz-Institut für innovative Mikroelektronik, Frankfurt, (Oder), Germany

2. Zoya Dyka

   Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics

   Affiliation as printed

   IHP – Leibniz-Institut für innovative Mikroelektronik, Frankfurt, (Oder), Germany

3. Dan Klann

   Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics

   Affiliation as printed

   IHP – Leibniz-Institut für innovative Mikroelektronik, Frankfurt, (Oder), Germany

4. Nele Mentens Aachen

   Leiden University · IMEC · KU Leuven

   Affiliation as printed

   ES&S and imec-COSIC/ESAT, KU Leuven, Belgium

   LIACS, eiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

5. Lejla Batina

   Radboud University Nijmegen

   Affiliation as printed

   Digital Security Group, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

6. Peter Langendöerfer

   Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg · Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics

   Affiliation as printed

   BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, Cottbus, Germany

   IHP – Leibniz-Institut für innovative Mikroelektronik, Frankfurt, (Oder), Germany