Error Detection and Recovery for ECC: A New Approach Against Side-Channel Attacks

Abstract

Side channel attacks allow an attacker to retrieve secret keys with far less effort than other attacks. Countermeasures against these attacks should be considered during cryptosystem design. This paper presents a novel low-cost error detection and recovery scheme (LOEDAR) to counter fault attacks. The proposed architecture retains the efficiency of the Montgomery ladder algorithm and shows strong resistance to both environmental-induced faults as well as attacker-introduced faults. Moreover, the proposed LOEDAR scheme is compatible with most existing countermeasures against various power analysis attacks including differential power analysis and its variants, which makes it extendable to a comprehensive countermeasure against both fault attacks and power analysis attacks.