Single Trace Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attacks on FPGA Implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is one of the commonly used public key cryptosystems. In this paper, we propose a generic single trace attack on ECC implementations which exploits the EM leakage of secret scalar bits. The proposed attack works in a black-box setting. Practical EM side channel attacks are demonstrated on unprotected and protected (point re-randomisation, scalar blinding) FPGA of the scalar multiplication over Twisted Edwards curve with success rate of about 99%. The attack setting directly applies to ECC based key agreement (ECDHE) and signatures (ECDSA) schemes with ephemeral secrets.