Vulnerability assessment of an IHP ECC implementation
- Mathematically, cryptographic approaches are secure. This means that the time an attacker needs for finding the secret by brute forcing these approaches is about the time of the existence of our world. Practically, an algorithm implemented in hardware is a device that generates a lot of additional data during calculation. Its power consumption, electromagnetic radiation etc. can be measured, saved and analysed for the key extraction. Such attacks - the side channel analysis attacks (SCA attacks) - are significant threats when applying cryptographic algorithms. By taking the issue of physical attacks into consideration when implementing a cryptographic algorithm, it is possible to design an implementation that is resilient - at least to a certain extend - against side channel analyses. In this report, we give implementation details of the IHP accelerator for the elliptic curve point multiplication. We analysed the implemented algorithm ow and its power consumption using simulated power traces for the 130nm CMOS IHP technology. We madeMathematically, cryptographic approaches are secure. This means that the time an attacker needs for finding the secret by brute forcing these approaches is about the time of the existence of our world. Practically, an algorithm implemented in hardware is a device that generates a lot of additional data during calculation. Its power consumption, electromagnetic radiation etc. can be measured, saved and analysed for the key extraction. Such attacks - the side channel analysis attacks (SCA attacks) - are significant threats when applying cryptographic algorithms. By taking the issue of physical attacks into consideration when implementing a cryptographic algorithm, it is possible to design an implementation that is resilient - at least to a certain extend - against side channel analyses. In this report, we give implementation details of the IHP accelerator for the elliptic curve point multiplication. We analysed the implemented algorithm ow and its power consumption using simulated power traces for the 130nm CMOS IHP technology. We made a horizontal power analysis attack using the difference-of-means test with the goal of finding potential SCA leakage sources, i.e. finding the operations in the algorithmic ow that are responsible for the correct extraction of the cryptographic key.…