Design and implementation of a side-channel resistant and low power RSA processor

RSA is the most widely used public-key algorithm, and is specified as the signature algorithm in bank IC cards. The unprotected RSA implementation is vulnerable to side-channel attacks as pointed out in several works. Due to the complexity of the algorithm, the power consumption of an RSA module is usually high. A side-channel resistant, efficient and low-power RSA processor was designed using countermeasures against side-channel attacks based on the Montgomery ladder with a modified Montgomery algorithm then proposed, which combines CIOS and Karatsuba algorithms. The computation time of modular multiplication can be reduced by 25% with the length of RSA being configurable and up to 2 048 bits. The proposed RSA module was verified with C*Core C0 in FPGA board. With SMIC 0.13 μm CMOS process, the EDA synthesis result indicates that the area is about 24 000 gates, and the throughput of 1024-bit RSA is 8.3 kb/s under the frequency of 30 MHz with the power consumption of 1.15 mW.