Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objectives: To resist power analysis attacks in modular exponentiation based cryptosystems like RSA. Methods/Analysis: A power analysis attack uses the instantaneous power consumed by a cryptosystems during its most sophisticated operations like encryption/decryption which uses the secret keys. Masking/blinding has proven its ability to resist such attacks by hiding the actual data during computation. As a result, analysis of the power consumption would reveal only the masked data keeping the actual secret data intact. Findings: Our proposed technique partitions the secret key into multiple parts and then blinds them individually before the cryptographic computations. With these blinded partitions, it would be very difficult for attackers to reveal the actual data as the power consumptions will be for blinded key not the actual key. Due to partitioning of the exponent there will be no uniformity in the power traces increasing resistance against power analysis attacks. Applications: All the cryptosystems have been found vulnerable to power analysis attacks, it resist modular exponentiation based cryptosystems like RSA from such attacks.

Keywords: Cryptosystem, Masking, Modular Exponentiation, Power Analysis Attacks, RSA