Timing Attacking and Counteracting on VLSI Implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography
This paper describes a timing attack against a VLSI implementation of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) over GF(2m). The algorithm of DA (Double Add) used for the scalar multiplication of ECC, is vulnerable to timing attack, and it reveals an amount of information such as the hamming weight of the key and other secrecies. By statistical analyses, a protected implementation by random masking timing characteristics is presented. The attacking results show that the implementation can enhance the security of the cryptosystem at the cost of 4 modular multipliers.