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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 the calculation process. Its power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, etc. can be measured, saved and analysed for key extraction. Such attacks are called side channel analysis attacks and are significant threats when applying cryptographic algorithms. By considering these attacks when implementing a cryptographic algorithm, it is possible to design an implementation that is more resistant against them.
The goal of this thesis was to design a methodology to securely implement the Montgomery kP-operation using an IHP implementation as a starting point. In addition, the area and energy consumption of the secure Montgomery kP-multiplier should still be highly efficient. The resistance against power analysis attacks of two different IHP ECC implementations was analysed in this thesis. A horizontal power analysis attack using the difference-of-means test was performed with the goal of finding potential leakage sources exploited in side channel analysis attacks, i.e. finding the reasons of a correct extraction of the cryptographic key. For both analysed ECC designs, four key candidates were extracted with a correctness of 90% or more. Through analysis of the implemented Montgomery kP-algorithm’s functionality and its power consumption, it was established that the algorithm’s operation execution flow was the main cause of the implementations’ vulnerability. Thus, a design methodology consisting in changing the Montgomery kP-algorithm operation flow was developed. As a result, the re-designed implementations do not deliver any correctly extracted key candidates whenever the difference-of-means test is performed on them. These re-designs implied an increase on the chip area by about 5% for each implementation. The execution time needed for performing a complete kP-operation was reduced for both designs. Thereby one implementation’s execution time was reduced by 12% in comparison to its original version and even though its power consumption was increased by 9%, its energy consumption per kP-operation was reduced by 4.5%.