Side Channel Power Analysis Attacks On Smartcard And Countermeasures

In order to protect the safety of the information in the smartcard chip, lots of cryptographic algorithms are used, which have high security in mathematics, however, side channel attacks (SCA) is a new cryptanalysis technique, which can obtain the important data and the key in the chip easily. Compared with traditional cryptanalysis, SCA has less key search space and better analytical performance and has become a serious threat to the smartcard. Among SCA, power analysis attacks are well known and hold the biggest threat, which makes it to be the hot topic in the field of information security nowadays.In this paper, the power analysis attacks to DES, RSA, ECC is studied, including simple power analysis attacks (SPA), differential power analysis attacks (DPA) and high order differential power analysis attacks (HO-DPA), Some contributions of the dissertation are enumerated as:Firstly, before and after TDES hardware implementation of the transformed masking method, successful DPA attacks are conducted, it proved that the scheme is not sufficiently to protect against DPA; Additionally, HO-DPA attacks to the method is given, which shows at algorithm level the implementation of masking technique will be vulnerable to HO-DPA attacks; An implementation of DES with Pipeline structure is well designed, which makes the plaintext interfered with each other and shields the run-time physical information. The design has low performance penalty and small memory cost and has better practicability.Secondly, in this paper, we point out that Ha’s scheme also involves an inverse operation during the recombination process by using CRT. Based on the idea of message blinding technique, we present an improved CRT-RSA signature scheme against all known power attacks (SPA, DPA, RDA, and (N-1) attack) and fault insertion attacks (FA). Furthermore, since our scheme has no inverse operation and does not require any additional parameters, it is more practical and efficient due to the low computation load compared with other existing countermeasures.Finally, as for ECC, we study the basic principle of power analysis attacks such as SPA, DPA, refined power analysis attacks (RPA) and zero-value point attacks (ZPA), and its countermeasures. Based on the scheme of message blinding technique and width-w NAF method we present three algorithms secure against all known power analysis attacks above, including without increase any computation of main loop.