A leak resistant architecture against side channel attacks

Abstract

Hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms may leak some information that can be used to recover cryptographic keys. This work combines reconfigurable techniques with the recently proposed Leak Resistant Arithmetic (LRA) to thwart some Side Channel Attacks (SCA). The introduced architecture outcomes the performance of classical implementation of modular multiplication, for key size exceeding 2048 bits, with a reasonable extra area overhead. Nevertheless, this is not a drawback, but a cost, since the main issue of the proposed architecture is the improved robustness in terms of security. © 2006 IEEE.