Implementation and Comparison of SPA and DPA Countermeasures for Elliptic Curve Point Multiplication

Ł. Ostrowski, K. Marcinek, W. Pleskacz (Warsaw Univ. of Techn., Poland)

The core operation of all cryptosystems based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography is Elliptic Curve Point Multiplication. Depending on implementation it can be vulnerable to different Side Channel Analysis attacks exploiting information leakage, such as power consumption or execution time. Multiple countermeasures against these attacks have been developed over time, each having different impact on parameters of the cryptosystem. This paper summarizes popular countermeasures for simple and differential power analysis attacks on Elliptic Curve cryptosystems. Presented secure algorithms were implemented in Verilog hardware description language and synthesized to logic gates for power trace generation.