Smart card fault attacks on public key and elliptic curve cryptography

Jie Ling, Purdue University

Abstract

Blömmer, Otto, and Seifert presented a fault attack on elliptic curve scalar multiplication called the Sign Change Attack, which causes a fault that changes the sign of the accumulation point.As the use of a sign bit for an extended integer is highly unlikely, this appears to be a highly selective manipulation of the key stream. In this thesis we describe two plausible fault attacks on a smart card implementation of elliptic curve cryptography. King and Wang designed a new attack called counter fault attack by attacking the scalar multiple of discrete-log cryptosystem. They then successfully generalize this approach to a family of attacks. By implementing King and Wang's scheme on RSA, we successfully attacked RSA keys for a variety of sizes. By implementing King and Wang's scheme on RSA, we successfully attacked RSA keys for a variety of sizes. Further, we generalized the attack model to an attack on any implementation that uses NAF and wNAF key.

Degree

M.S.E.C.E.

Advisors

King, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Computer Engineering

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