State-of-the-art of secure ECC implementations: a survey on known side-channel attacks and countermeasures

Abstract

Implementations of cryptographic primitives are vulnerable to physical attacks. While the adversary only needs to succeed in one out of many attack methods, the designers have to consider all the known attacks, whenever applicable to their system, simultaneously. Thus, keeping an organized, complete and up-to-date table of physical attacks and countermeasures is of paramount importance to system designers. This paper summarizes known physical attacks and countermeasures on Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems. Instead of repeating the details of different attacks, we focus on a systematic way of organizing and understanding known attacks and countermeasures. Three principles of selecting countermeasures to thwart multiple attacks are given. This paper can be used as a road map for countermeasure selection in a first design iteration.