Key Bit-Dependent Side-Channel Attacks on Protected Binary Scalar Multiplication †

Abstract

Binary scalar multiplication, which is the main operation of elliptic curve cryptography, is vulnerable to side-channel analysis. It is especially vulnerable to side-channel analysis using power consumption and electromagnetic emission patterns. Thus, various countermeasures have been reported. However, they focused on eliminating patterns of conditional branches, statistical characteristics according to intermediate values, or data inter-relationships. Even though secret scalar bits are directly loaded during the check phase, countermeasures for this phase have not been considered. Therefore, in this paper, we show that there is side-channel leakage associated with secret scalar bit values. We experimented with hardware and software implementations, and experiments were focused on the Montgomery–López–Dahab ladder algorithm protected by scalar randomization in hardware implementations. We show that we could extract secret key bits with a 100% success rate using a single trace. Moreover, our attack did not require sophisticated preprocessing and could defeat existing countermeasures using a single trace. We focused on the key bit identification functions of mbedTLS and OpenSSL in software implementations. The success rate was over 94%, so brute-force attacks could still be able to recover the whole secret scalar bits. We propose a countermeasure and demonstrate experimentally that it can be effectively applied.