Research and simulation of timing attacks on ECC

Abstract

Based on the hidden Markov model (HMM) idea,a timing attack on the elliptic curve digital signature system,which adopted the “double-and-add” scalar multiplication,was proposed.Simulation experiments on the secure Koblitz curve which released by the National Institute of Standards Technology (NIST) were implemented and four secure Koblitz curves except the K-571 were attacked successfully.The experiment results show that the attack can recover almost all the key bits in a few minutes by collecting only once time data,and is easy to imple-ment at a high success rate.

Keywords

• side channel attack
• timing attack
• hidden markov model
• elliptic curve cryptography