Quantitative evaluation of side-channel security for Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems

Side-channel security has aroused widespread attentions since the first publication of power analysis attack. Enormous research efforts were dedicated to new countermeasures against side-channel attacks. However, there have been very few reports about how to quantitatively verify the effectiveness. This paper presents statistical approaches of quantitative evaluation for Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems. The significance test over the difference of mean measures the distinguishability of the secret key in scalar multiplication. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed evaluation approaches are accurate and feasible.