Power analysis for secret recovering and reverse engineering of public key algorithms

Abstract

Power Analysis has been deeply studied since 1998 in order to improve the security of tamper resistant products such as Trusted Platform Module (TPM). The study has evolved from initial basic techniques like simple and differential power analysis to more complex models such as correlation. However, works on correlation techniques have essentially been focused on symmetric cryptography. We analyze here the interests of this technique when applied to different smartcard coprocessors dedicated to asymmetric cryptography implementations. This study leads us to discover and realize new attacks on RSA and ECC type algorithms with fewer curves than classical attacks. We also present how correlation analysis is a powerful tool to reverse engineer asymmetric implementations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.