Collision-Based Power Analysis of Modular Exponentiation Using Chosen-Message Pairs
Naofumi Homma1
, Atsushi Miyamoto1
, Takafumi Aoki1
, Akashi Satoh2
and Adi Shamir3 
| (1) |
Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, |
| (2) |
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, |
| (3) |
Weizmann Institute of Science, |
Abstract
This paper proposes new chosen-message power-analysis attacks against public-key cryptosystems based on modular exponentiation,
which use specific input pairs to generate collisions between squaring operations at different locations in the two power
traces. Unlike previous attacks of this kind, the new attacks can be applied to all the standard implementations of the exponentiation
process: binary (left-to-right and right-to-left), m-ary, and sliding window methods. The SPA countermeasure of inserting dummy multiplications can also be defeated (in some
cases) by using the proposed attacks. The effectiveness of the attacks is demonstrated by actual experiments with hardware
and software implementations of RSA on an FPGA and the PowerPC processor, respectively. In addition to the new collision generation
methods, a high-accuracy waveform matching technique is introduced to detect the collisions even when the recorded signals
are noisy and the clock has some jitter.
Keywords side-channel attacks - power-analysis attacks - RSA - modular exponentiation - waveform matching
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