An efficient countermeasure against fault attacks for a right-to-left binary exponentiation algorithm was proposed by Boscher,
Naciri and Prouff (WISTP, 2007). This countermeasure was later generalized by Baek (Int. J. Inf. Sec., 2010) to the 2
w
-ary right-to-left algorithms for any
w \geqslant 1w \geqslant 1 (the case
w = 1 corresponding to the method of Boscher, Naciri and Prouff). In this paper, we modify theses algorithms, devise new coherence
relations for error detection, and reduce the memory requirements without sacrificing the performance or the security. In
particular, a full register (in working memory) can be gained compared to previous implementations. As a consequence, the
implementations described in this paper are particularly well suited to applications for which memory is a premium. This includes
smart-card implementations of exponentiation-based cryptosystems.
Keywords Fault attacks – countermeasures – exponentiation – memory-constrained devices – smart cards