Smart card fault attacks on public key and elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

Blömmer, Otto, and Seifert presented a fault attack on elliptic curve scalar multiplication called the Sign Change Attack, which causes a fault that changes the sign of the accumulation point. As the use of a sign bit for an extended integer is highly unlikely, this appears to be a highly selective manipulation of the key stream. In this thesis we describe two plausible fault attacks on a smart card implementation of elliptic curve cryptography. King and Wang designed a new attack called counter fault attack by attacking the scalar multiple of discrete-log cryptosystem. They then successfully generalize this approach to a family of attacks. By implementing King and Wang's scheme on RSA, we successfully attacked RSA keys for a variety of sizes. Further, we generalized the attack model to an attack on any implementation that uses NAF and wNAF key.