Analyzing side-channel leakage of rfid-suitable lightweight ECC hardware

Abstract

Using RFID tags for security critical applications requires the integration of cryptographic primitives, e.g., Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). It is specially important to consider that RFID tags are easily accessible to perform practical side-channel attacks due to their fields of applications. In this paper, we investigate a practical attack scenario on a randomized ECC hardware implementation suitable for RFID tags. This implementation uses a Montgomery Ladder, Randomized Projective Coordinates (RPC), and a digit-serial hardware multiplier. By using different analysis techniques, we are able to recover the secret scalar while using only a single power trace. One attack correlates two consecutive Montgomery ladder rounds, while another attack directly recovers intermediate operands processed within the digit-serial multiplier. All attacks are verified using a simulated ASIC model and an FPGA implementation.