Enhancing Simple Power-Analysis Attacks on Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems

Abstract

Recent applications of lattice attacks against elliptic curve cryptosystems have shown that the protection of ephemeral keys in the ECDSA is of greatest importance. This paper shows how to enhance simple power-analysis attacks on elliptic-curve point-multiplication algorithms by using Markov models. We demonstrate the attack on an addition-subtraction algorithm (fixing the sequence of elliptic-curve operations) which is similar to the one described by Morain et al. in [MO90] and apply the method to the general addition-subtraction method described in ANSI X9.62 [ANS99]. © Springer-Verlag 2003.