[Resource Topic] 2021/1003: SCA-secure ECC in software – mission impossible?

Welcome to the resource topic for 2021/1003

Title:
SCA-secure ECC in software – mission impossible?

Authors: Lejla Batina, Łukasz Chmielewski, Björn Haase, Niels Samwel, Peter Schwabe

Abstract:

This paper describes an ECC implementation computing the X25519 key-exchange protocol on the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. This software comes with extensive mitigations against various side-channel and fault attacks and is, to our best knowledge, the first to claim affordable protection against multiple classes of attacks that are motivated by distinct real-world application scenarios. We also present the results of a comprehensive side-channel evaluation. We distinguish between X25519 with ephemeral keys and X25519 with static keys and show that the overhead to protect the two is about 36% and 239% respectively. While this might seem to be a high price to pay for security, we also show that even our (most protected) static implementation is as efficient as widely-deployed ECC cryptographic libraries, which offer much less protection.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1003

See all topics related to this paper.

Feel free to post resources that are related to this paper below.

Example resources include: implementations, explanation materials, talks, slides, links to previous discussions on other websites.

For more information, see the rules for Resource Topics .