Prevention of Simple Power Analysis Attacks in Elliptical Curve Cryptography on WSN Platform

Abstract

All ECC protocols are based on point addition and point doubling operations. These two operations requires dissimilar power and execution time on WSN node. In binary method of scalar multiplication, point addition always corresponds to 1 and point doubling corresponds to 0. The private key of the WSN node is recoded in the form of 1 and 0, while doing scalar multiplication. All these knowledge in the public domain provides sufficient side channel leakage at lower levels to the attacker to know the entire key in the sequence of 1 and 0 by analyzing power consumption of microcontroller and time required for execution on WSN node for particular cryptographic routine. These types of attacks are not theoretical and can be carried out with instruments such as power oscilloscopes to measure the power consumption of sensor nodes while implementing cryptographic algorithm. This paper also discuss the counter measures available for defending simple power analysis attacks.