Provably Secure Countermeasure Resistant to Several Types of Power Attack for ECC

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown that some cryptographic devices, such as smart card, RFID and USB token, are vulnerable to the power attacks if they have no defence against them. With the introduction of new types of power analysis attack on elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) which is implemented in these secure devices, most existing countermeasures against differential power analysis (DPA) are now vulnerable to new power attacks, such as a doubling attack (DA), refined power analysis attack (RPA), and zero-value point attack (ZPA). Mamiya et al. recently proposed a countermeasure (so-called BRIP) against the DPA, RPA, ZPA, and simple power analysis (SPA) by introducing a random initial value. Yet, the BRIP was also shown to be vulnerable to the address-bit DPA by Itoh et al. and the 2-torsion attack by Yen et al.. Accordingly, this paper proposes a secure countermeasure based on a message-blinding technique. A security analysis demonstrates that the proposed countermeasure is secure against most existing power attacks with just a few additional registers.KeywordsECCSide channel attackPower analysis attackSmart card