Side-channel resistant system-level design flow for public-key cryptography

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose a new design methodology to assess the risk for side-channel attacks, more specifically timing analysis and simple power analysis, at an early design stage. This method is illustrated with the design of an elliptic curve cryptographic processor. It also allows to evaluate the quality of countermeasures against these attacks by evaluating hamming distances for eachsignal and each register in a partial functional domain (e.g. datapath or controller). Thus a first order side-channel-resistant design can be obtained with system-level design in which the simulation can run faster than conventional HDL simulations.

REFERENCES

• 1: N. Koblitz, "Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems," Math. Computation, vol. 48, pp. 203--9, 1987.
• 2: Victor S Miller, Use of elliptic curves in cryptography, Lecture notes in computer sciences; 218 on Advances in cryptology---CRYPTO 85, p.417-426, June 1986, Santa Barbara, California, United States
• 3: R. Anderson and M. Kuhn, "Tamper-resistance - a cautionary note," in Proceesings of the 2nd USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce. USENIX Association, pp. 1--11, 1996.
• 4: D. Boneh, R. A. DeMillo, and R. J. Lipton, "On the importance of checking cryptographic protocols for faults," in Proc. of EUROCRYPTO'97. LNCS, vol. 1233, pp. 37--51, 1997.
• 5: Paul C. Kocher, Timing Attacks on Implementations of Diffie-Hellman, RSA, DSS, and Other Systems, Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.104-113, August 18-22, 1996
• 6: Paul C. Kocher , Joshua Jaffe , Benjamin Jun, Differential Power Analysis, Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.388-397, August 15-19, 1999
• 7: A. Shamir and E. Tromer, "Acoustic cryptanalysis On nosy people and noisy machines," http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/.
• 8: Kris Tiri , Ingrid Verbauwhede, Simulation models for side-channel information leaks, Proceedings of the 42nd annual conference on Design automation, June 13-17, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1065579.1065640]
• 9: Patrick Schaumont , Ingrid Verbauwhede, Interactive Cosimulation with Partial Evaluation, Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe, p.10642, February 16-20, 2004
• 10: Ian F. Blake , G. Seroussi , N. P. Smart, Elliptic curves in cryptography, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1999
• 11: Jean-Sébastien Coron, Resistance against Differential Power Analysis for Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems, Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems, p.292-302, August 12-13, 1999
• 12: Tetsuya Izu , Tsuyoshi Takagi, A Fast Parallel Elliptic Curve Multiplication Resistant against Side Channel Attacks, Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptosystems: Public Key Cryptography, p.280-296, February 12-14, 2002
• 13: K. Okeya and T. Takagi, "A more flexible countermeasure against side channle attacks usign window method," in Proc. of CHES'03. LNCS, vol. 2779, pp. 397--410, 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.6 LOGIC DESIGN
      B.6.3 Design Aids
          Subjects: Simulation

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.6 LOGIC DESIGN
      B.6.3 Design Aids
          Subjects: Verification

  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Smartcards

General Terms:
Design, Security, Verification

Keywords:
elliptic curve cryptography, side-channel attack, system-level modeling