Flexible FPGA ECDSA Design with a Field Multiplier Inherently Resistant against HCCA

TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible FPGA-based ECDSA implementation over binary fields that inherently resists horizontal collision correlation attacks, enhancing security in cryptographic hardware designs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel FPGA ECDSA design with a field multiplier resistant to horizontal attacks, improving security and flexibility for elliptic curve cryptography.

Findings

Resistant to Horizontal Collision Correlation Attacks (HCCA)

Uses Montgomery kP algorithm with Lopez-Dahab coordinates

Provides a secure, flexible field multiplier for cryptographic applications

Abstract

In this paper we describe our flexible ECDSA design for elliptic curve over binary extended fields GF(2l). We investigated its resistance against Horizontal Collision Correlation Attacks (HCCA). Due to the fact that our design is based on the Montgomery kP algorithm using Lopez-Dahab projective coordinates the scalar k cannot be successful revealed using HCCA, but this kind of attacks can be helpful to divide the measured traces into parts that correspond to processing of a single bit of the scalar k. The most important contribution of this paper is that our flexible field multiplier is resistant against horizontal attacks. This inherent resistance makes it a valuable building block for designing unified field multipliers.