Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.

Jeremy Dubeuf

Frank Lhermet

Yann Yves Rene Loisel

Described herein are systems and methods that prevent against fault injection attacks. In various embodiments this is accomplished by taking advantage of the fact that an attacker cannot utilize a result that has been faulted to recover a secret. By using infective computation, an error is propagated in a loop such that the faulted value will provide to the attacker no useful information or information from which useful information may be extracted. Faults from a fault attack will be so large that a relatively large number of bits will change. As a result, practically no secret information can be extracted by restoring bits.

Fault attack resistant cryptographic systems and methods

Various embodiments of the invention implement countermeasures designed to withstand attacks by potential intruders who seek partial or full retrieval of elliptic curve secrets by using Various embodiments of the invention implement countermeasures designed to withstand attacks by potential intruders who seek partial or full retrieval of elliptic curve secrets by using known methods that exploit system vulnerabilities, including elliptic operation differentiation, dummy operation detection, lattice attacks, and first real operation detection. Various embodiments of the invention provide resistance against side-channel attacks, such as simple power analysis, caused by the detectability of scalar values from information leaked during regular operation flow that would otherwise compromise system security. In certain embodiments, system immunity is maintained by performing elliptic scalar operations that use secret-independent operation flow in a secure Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem.

Systems and methods for operating secure elliptic curve cryptosystems

Presented are systems and methods for protecting secret data that is stored in memory to prevent unauthorized access and data manipulation. Various embodiments may be applied to hide or mask an RSA exponent used for public key cryptography and stored in a cryptographic hardware block that uses a non-erasable working memory for computations. In certain embodiments, masking RSA exponents is accomplished by a two-step process that combines a specifically calculated, random and secret value with the secret exponent. The random value is stored in an erasable memory, such that in case of attack, both the erasable memory and the non-erasable memory do not leak any embedded secrets. The additional expenditure of memory resources only insignificantly affects system performance.

Systems and methods for masking RSA operations

Various embodiments of the invention implement countermeasures designed to withstand attacks by potential intruders who seek partial or full retrieval of elliptic curve secrets by using known methods that exploit system vulnerabilities, including elliptic operation differentiation, dummy operation detection, lattice attacks, and first real operation detection. Various embodiments of the invention provide resistance against side-channel attacks, such as sample power analysis, caused by the detectability of scalar values from information leaked during regular operation flow that would otherwise compromise system security. In certain embodiments, system immunity is maintained by performing elliptic scalar operations that use secret-independent operation flow in a secure Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem.

Growing community of inventors

La Ciotat, France

Jeremy Dubeuf