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Side-Channel Evaluation of Elliptic-Curve Cryptography

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is a public-key system based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves. Compared to other systems in use such as RSA, ECC allows for smaller key size for an equivalent level of security.

This size and additional performance advantage for ECC make it an interesting system to implement for embedded devices where performance and bandwidth are often limited. But this environment also brings new challenges as a potential attacker has a physical access to the device and is now able to perform more invasive attacks.

A particular category of such attacks is side-channel attacks, where the attacker uses physical variables of the device, such as power consumption or timing, to recover secret information.

In the first part of this work, a C implementation of the P-256 curve for a 32-bit processor has been implemented with different countermeasures.

The second part is the characterisation of the leakage of said implementations to measure the effectiveness and cost of different countermeasures.

The result is the implementation, capable of performing ECDH, ECDSA and ECIES operations, with the measurement of the leakage and a comparative benchmark of the performance against MbedTLS.