A side-channel-attack countermeasure for elliptic curve point multiplication based on dynamic power compensation

Abstract

Elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) is the most crucial operation in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and is vulnerable to side-channel attack (SCA). Based on power hiding technology, this paper proposes an SCA countermeasure for mutual power compensation of ECC logic units, which eliminates the difference between correct and incorrect keys by constructing a power-mapping model. The correlation power analysis (CPA) experiment for the second-highest key shows that this countermeasure increases the measurement to disclosure (MTD) by more than 1064 times with no performance overhead and loss of 19.9% energy and 6.0% LUT, 2.1% FF.