An efficiently secure ECC scalar multiplication method against Power Analysis Attacks on resource constrained devices

Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems (ECC) are believed to offer same level of security such as RSA with a much shorter key length, and thus they seem to be ideal for applications with computation resource-restricted devices such a wireless sensor networks (WSN), smart cards, radio frequency identity (RFID), etc. However, like any other cryptographic primitive, ECC implementations are vulnerable to Power Analysis Attacks (PAA) that may reveal the secret keys by exploiting leaked power consumption from running cryptographic devices. In this paper, we propose an ECC Scalar Multiplication (ECSM) method that provides security against PAA on resource constrained devices. The main idea of propose method is to confuse the attacker by delaying some computations using buffering techniques. The proposed method has been implemented on Altera Cyclone III EP3C80F780C7 FPGA over GF(2¹⁷³), GF(2¹⁹¹), and GF(2²³⁰). The results show that the proposed method is very promising in terms of time, area and power for resource constrained devices.