Unveiling ECC Vulnerabilities: LSTM Networks for Operation Recognition in Side-Channel Attacks

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Battistello, Alberto, Bertoni, Guido, Corrias, Michele, Nava, Lorenzo, Rusconi, Davide, Zoia, Matteo, Pierazzi, Fabio, Lanzi, Andrea
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866910842756268032
author Battistello, Alberto
Bertoni, Guido
Corrias, Michele
Nava, Lorenzo
Rusconi, Davide
Zoia, Matteo
Pierazzi, Fabio
Lanzi, Andrea
author_facet Battistello, Alberto
Bertoni, Guido
Corrias, Michele
Nava, Lorenzo
Rusconi, Davide
Zoia, Matteo
Pierazzi, Fabio
Lanzi, Andrea
contents We propose a novel approach for performing side-channel attacks on elliptic curve cryptography. Unlike previous approaches and inspired by the ``activity detection'' literature, we adopt a long-short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to analyze a power trace and identify patterns of operation in the scalar multiplication algorithm performed during an ECDSA signature, that allows us to recover bits of the ephemeral key, and thus retrieve the signer's private key. Our approach is based on the fact that modular reductions are conditionally performed by micro-ecc and depend on key bits. We evaluated the feasibility and reproducibility of our attack through experiments in both simulated and real implementations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack by implementing it on a real target device, an STM32F415 with the micro-ecc library, and successfully compromise it. Furthermore, we show that current countermeasures, specifically the coordinate randomization technique, are not sufficient to protect against side channels. Finally, we suggest other approaches that may be implemented to thwart our attack.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17330
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unveiling ECC Vulnerabilities: LSTM Networks for Operation Recognition in Side-Channel Attacks
Battistello, Alberto
Bertoni, Guido
Corrias, Michele
Nava, Lorenzo
Rusconi, Davide
Zoia, Matteo
Pierazzi, Fabio
Lanzi, Andrea
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
We propose a novel approach for performing side-channel attacks on elliptic curve cryptography. Unlike previous approaches and inspired by the ``activity detection'' literature, we adopt a long-short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to analyze a power trace and identify patterns of operation in the scalar multiplication algorithm performed during an ECDSA signature, that allows us to recover bits of the ephemeral key, and thus retrieve the signer's private key. Our approach is based on the fact that modular reductions are conditionally performed by micro-ecc and depend on key bits. We evaluated the feasibility and reproducibility of our attack through experiments in both simulated and real implementations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack by implementing it on a real target device, an STM32F415 with the micro-ecc library, and successfully compromise it. Furthermore, we show that current countermeasures, specifically the coordinate randomization technique, are not sufficient to protect against side channels. Finally, we suggest other approaches that may be implemented to thwart our attack.
title Unveiling ECC Vulnerabilities: LSTM Networks for Operation Recognition in Side-Channel Attacks
topic Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17330