Electromagnetic Analysis Attack on an FPGA Implementation of an Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem

Abstract

This paper presents simple (SEMA) and differential (DEMA) electromagnetic analysis attacks on an FPGA implementation of an elliptic curve processor. Elliptic curve cryptography is a public key cryptosystem that is becoming increasingly popular. Implementations of cryptographic algorithms should not only be fast, compact and power efficient, but they should also resist side channel attacks. One of the side channels is the electromagnetic radiation out of an integrated circuit. Hence it is very important to assess the vulnerability of implementations of cryptosystems against these attacks. A SEMA attack on an unprotected implementation can find all the key bits with only one measurement. We also describe a DEMA attack on an improved implementation and demonstrate that a correlation analysis requires 1000 measurements to find the key bits