A practical countermeasure against address-bit differential power analysis

Abstract

The differential power analysis (DPA) enables an adversary to reveal the secret key hidden in a smart card by observing power consumption. The address-bit DPA is a typical example of DPA which analyzes a correlation between addresses of registers and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a practical countermeasure, the randomized addressing counter-measure, against the address-bit DPA which can be applied to the exponentiation part in RSA or ECC with and without pre-computed table. Our countermeasure has almost no overhead for the protection, namely the processing speed is no slower than that without the countermeasure. We also report experimental results of the countermeasure in order to show its effect. Finally, a complete comparison of countermeasures from various view points including the processing speed and the security level is given. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.