Title: SPA resistant elliptic curve cryptosystem using addition chains

Authors: Andrew Byrne, Francis Crowe, William Peter Marnane, Nicolas Meloni, Arnaud Tisserand, Emanuel M. Popovici

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. ' Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. ' Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. ' LIRMM, CNRS, University Montpellier 2, France. ' LIRMM, CNRS, University Montpellier 2, France. ' Department of Microelectronic Engineering, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

Abstract: There has been a lot of interest in recent years in the problems faced by cryptosystems due to side channel attacks. Algorithms for elliptic curve point scalar multiplication such as the double-and-add method are prone to such attacks. By making use of special addition chains, it is possible to implement a Simple Power Analysis (SPA) resistant cryptosystem. In this paper, a reconfigurable architecture for a cryptographic processor is presented. A SPA resistant algorithm for point multiplication is implemented and is shown to be faster than the double-and-add method. Post place and route results for the processor are given.

Keywords: elliptic curve cryptography; elliptic curves; addition chains; side channel attacks; simple power analysis; SPA; reconfigurable architecture; cryptographic processors.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHPSA.2007.015399

International Journal of High Performance Systems Architecture, 2007 Vol.1 No.2, pp.133 - 142

Published online: 14 Oct 2007 *

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