Power analysis is a serious attack to implementation of elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC) on smart cards. For ECC, many power
analysis attacks and countermeasures have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a novel power analysis attack using differential
power between modular
multiplication and modular
squaring. We show how this difference occurs in CMOS circuits by counting the expectation of signal transition frequency, and present
a simulation result on our ECC co-processor. The proposed attack is applicable to two efficient power analysis countermeasures
based on unified addition formulae and elliptic curves with Montgomery form.
Keywords: Smart cards, elliptic curve cryptosystems, power analysis, DPA, modular multiplication.