• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.1079-1087
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• 2018

Binary scalar multiplication which is the main operation of elliptic curve cryptography is vulnerable to the side-channel analysis. Especially, it is vulnerable to the side-channel analysis which uses power consumption and electromagnetic emission patterns. Thus, various countermeasures have been studied. However, they have focused on eliminating patterns of data dependent branches, statistical characteristic according to intermediate values, or the interrelationships between data. No countermeasure have been taken into account for the secure design of the key bit check phase, although the secret scalar bits are directly loaded during that phase. Therefore, in this paper, we demonstrate that we can extract secret scalar bits with 100% success rate using a single power or a single electromagnetic trace by performing key bit-dependent attack on hardware implementation of binary scalar multiplication algorithm. Experiments are focused on the $Montgomery-L{\acute{o}}pez-Dahab$ ladder algorithm protected by scalar randomization. Our attack does not require sophisticated pre-processing and can defeat existing countermeasures using a single-trace. As a result, we propose a countermeasure and suggest that it should be applied.