Abstract
Elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECCs) are becoming more popular because of the reduced number of key bits required in comparison to other cryptosystems (e.g. a 160 bit ECC has roughly the same security as 1024 bit RSA). ECCs are especially suited to smart cards because of the limited memory and computational power available on these devices. However, the side-channel attacks which have recently been proposed can obtain information about the cryptosystem by measuring side-channel information such as power consumption and processing time. This information may be used to break implementations that have not incorporated defences against these attacks. This paper presents a new defence against Simple Power Analysis (SPA). This new defence is based on the NAF (non-adjacent form) representation of a scalar and requires 44% fewer additions and 11% extra doublings than the commonly recommended defence of performing a point addition in every loop of the binary scalar multiplication algorithm.
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Hitchcock, Y., Montague, P. (2002). A New Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication Algorithm to Resist Simple Power Analysis. In: Batten, L., Seberry, J. (eds) Information Security and Privacy. ACISP 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2384. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45450-0_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45450-0_18
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