Simple power analysis attacks using chosen message against ECC hardware implementations

Chosen-message simple power analysis (SPA) attacks were powerful against public-key cryptosystem based on modular exponentiation, due to the special results of modular square and modular multiplication for input pair X and - X. However, the characteristics can not be applied to public-key cryptosystems based on scalar multiplications. This paper proposes novel chosen-message side-channel analysis attacks for public-key cryptosystems based on scalar multiplications, where special input point P is chosen close to X-axis to generate noticeable variations for point doubling and point addition. The proposed attack can be applied to all standard implementations of the binary algorithms, both for left-to-right and right-to-left methods. This chosen-message method can also circumvent typical countermeasures such as the double-and-add-always algorithm.