Exploiting the Order of Multiplier Operands: A Low Cost Approach for HCCA Resistance.
Poulami Das, Debapriya Basu Roy, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay · 2015
Abstract—Horizontal collision correlation analysis (HCCA) imposes a serious threat to simple power analysis resistant elliptic curve cryptosystems involving unified algorithms, for e.g. Edward curve unified formula. This attack can be mounted even in presence of differential power analysis resistant randomization schemes. In this paper we have designed an effective countermea-sure for HCCA protection, where the dependency of side-channel leakage from a school-book multiplication with the underling multiplier operands is investigated. We have shown how changing the sequence in which the operands are passed to the multi-plication algorithm introduces dissimilarity in the information leakage. This disparity has been utilized in constructing a zero-cost countermeasure against HCCA. This countermeasure inte-grated with an effective randomization method has been shown to successfully thwart HCCA. Additionally we provide experimental validation for our proposed countermeasure technique on a SASEBO platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that asymmetry in information leakage has been utilized in designing a side channel countermeasure. Index Terms—ECC, HCCA, countermeasure, asymmetric leak-age, field multiplications I.