A Second-Order DPA Attack Breaks a Window-Method Based Countermeasure against Side Channel Attacks

  • Authors:
  • Katsuyuki Okeya;Kouichi Sakurai

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • ISC '02 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Security
  • Year:
  • 2002

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

M枚ller proposed a countermeasure using window method against side channel attacks. However, its immunity to side channel attacks is still controversial. In this paper, we show M枚ller's countermeasure is vulnerable to a second-order differential power analysis attack. A side channel attackis an attackthat takes advantage of information leaked during execution of a cryptographic procedure. An nth-order differential power analysis attackis the side channel attack which uses n different leaked data that correspond to n different intermediate values during the execution. Our proposed attackagainst M枚ller's countermeasure finds out the use of same elliptic points, and restricts candidates of the secret scalar value. In these circumstances, the attack completely detects the scalar value using Baby-Step-Giant-Step method as a direct-computational attack. For a 160-bit scalar value, the proposed attack restricts the number of candidates of the scalar to a 45-bit integer, and the direct-computational attackcan actually detect the scalar value. Besides, we improve M枚ller's countermeasure to prevent the proposed attack. We compare the original method and improved countermeasure in terms of the computational intractability and the computational cost of the scalar multiplication.