Design of a secure architecture for scalar multiplication on elliptic curves

International audienceEmbedded systems support more and more features. Authentication and confidentiality are part of them. These systems have limitations that put the public-key RSA algorithm at a disadvantage: Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) becomes more attractive because it requires less energy and less area. A lot of attacks exploit physical access on cryptographic hardware device: power analysis attacks (SPA, DPA), or timing analysis attacks. The coprocessor presented here supports all critical operations of an ECC cryptosystem and has been secured against side channel attacks