Elliptic curves see more and more use in public key cryptography, mostly because of their performance and small key sizes. They are especially well fitted for low-resource devices such as smart-cards or embedded devices. However, the structure and complexity of elliptic curve cryptography makes it ripe for side-channel attacks like power-tracing, which uses fluctuations in physical emanations of a device, to break its security properties. We aim to develop a suite of mathematical tests for the verification of correctness of elliptic curve cryptography implementations together with an open-source toolkit for side-channel analysis of elliptic curve cryptography implementations. We will then use it to analyze resistance of elliptic curve cryptography implementations on programmable smart-cards to side-channel attacks.

Publications