Towards fault-tolerant cryptographic computations over finite fields

  • Authors:
  • Arash Reyhani-Masoleh;M. Anwar Hasan

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada;University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Cryptographic schemes, such as authentication, confidentiality, and integrity, rely on computations in very large finite fields, whose hardware realization may require millions of logic gates. In a straightforward design, even a single fault in such a complex circuit is likely to yield an incorrect result and may be exploited by an attacker to break the cryptosystem. In this regard, we consider computing over finite fields in presence of certain faults in multiplier circuits. Our work reported here deals with errors caused by such faults in polynomial basis multipliers over finite fields of characteristic two and presents a scheme to correct single errors. Towards this, pertinent theoretical results are derived, and both bit-parallel and bit-serial fault tolerant multipliers are proposed.