Sign change fault attacks on elliptic curve cryptosystems

  • Authors:
  • Johannes Blömer;Martin Otto;Jean-Pierre Seifert

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute for Computer Science, Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany;Institute for Computer Science, Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany;Virtualization & Trust Lab — CTG, Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, OR

  • Venue:
  • FDTC'06 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Cryptography
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We present a new type of fault attacks on elliptic curve scalar multiplications: Sign Change Attacks. These attacks exploit different number representations as they are often employed in modern cryptographic applications. Previously, fault attacks on elliptic curves aimed to force a device to output points which are on a cryptographically weak curve. Such attacks can easily be defended against. Our attack produces points which do not leave the curve and are not easily detected. The paper also presents a revised scalar multiplication algorithm that protects against Sign Change Attacks.