Towards secure communications: Review of side channel attacks and countermeasures on ECC

Abstract

There are many recent revolutionary technologies and advances in wireless communication and networking that changed the lives of millions of people around us. The wide spread of the Internet and the smart mobile devices which is equipped with wireless technologies to access the Internet, enabled people to contact each other regardless of their geographic location. These communications involve sharing and transferring sensitive information that must be protected. Therefore, there is an increasing need to secure the individuals and organizations data which is considered a big challenge in communication and networking systems nowadays. The cryptographic algorithms are used to provide many security services to secure the communication channels and networks such as authentication, data integrity and confidentiality. But, recently, there are cyber attacks on these crypto-functions and their implementations, mainly Side Channel Attacks. So, compromising the security of these algorithms implies compromising the security of the communication systems that are using them. Among the most known asymmetric encryption algorithms is the Elliptic Curve Cryptography which is used to protect sensitive data in many financial and government applications. In this research, we present most recent Side channel attacks on Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Also, we discuss the suitable effective countermeasures used to protect from these cyber attacks towards obtaining more secure communication systems.