SEMA and MESD Leakage of TinyECC 2.0 on a LOTUS Sensor Node

Abstract. TinyECC 2.0 is an open source library for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) in wireless sensor networks. This paper analyzes the side channel susceptibility of TinyECC 2.0 on a LOTUS sensor node platform. In our work we measured the electromagnetic (EM) emana-tion during computation of the scalar multiplication using 56 dierent congurations of TinyECC 2.0. All of them were found to be vulnera-ble, but to a dierent degree. The dierent degrees of leakage include adversary success using (i) Simple EM Analysis (SEMA) with a single measurement, (ii) SEMA using averaging, and (iii) Multiple-Exponent Single-Data (MESD) with a single measurement of the secret scalar. It is extremely critical that in 30 TinyECC 2.0 congurations a single EM measurement of an ECC private key operation is sucient to simply read out the secret scalar. MESD requires additional adversary capabili-ties and it aects all TinyECC 2.0 congurations, again with only a single measurement of the ECC private key operation. These ndings give evi-dence that in security applications a conguration of TinyECC 2.0 should be chosen that withstands SEMA with a single measurement and, be-yond that, an addition of appropriate randomizing countermeasures is necessary