Power attack and evaluation on elliptic curve cryptosystem in a commercial smart card

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a widely used cryptographic algorithm in our life. Although its theory has become one of the focuses, it is difficult to ensure its security during the process of implementation. One can break it easily by using side-channel attack such as power attack. In this paper, a key recovery platform is built with computer, filter, signal acquisition module, oscilloscope, and so on. Then, we implement the simple power attack on ECC, and employ self-correlation analysis to make it easy to recover the secret key automatically. Finally, some relevant and effective countermeasures are suggested against power attacks.