SPA against an FPGA-B ased RSA implementation with a high-radix montgomery multiplier

Abstract

Simple Power Analysis (SPA) was applied to an RSA processor with a high-radix Montgomery multiplier on an FPGA platform, and the different characteristics of power waveforms caused by two types of multiplier (built-in and custom) were investigated in detail. We also applied an active attack where input data was set to a specific pattern to control the modular multiplication. The power dissipation for the multiplication was greatly reduced in comparison with modular squaring, resulting in success in revealing all of the secret key bits. © 2007 IEEE.