Paper 2022/448 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2022/448 ↗

Attacks Against White-Box ECDSA and Discussion of Countermeasures - A Report on the WhibOx Contest 2021

Sven Bauer
Hermann Drexler
Maximilian Gebhardt
Dominik Klein
Friederike Laus
Johannes Mittmann
Abstract

This paper deals with white-box implementations of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA): First, we consider attack paths to break such implementations. In particular, we provide a systematic overview of various fault attacks, to which ECDSA white-box implementations are especially susceptible. Then, we propose different mathematical countermeasures, mainly based on masking/blinding of sensitive variables, in order to prevent or at least make such attacks more difficult. We also briefly mention some typical implementational countermeasures and their challenges in the ECDSA white-box scenario. Our work has been initiated by the CHES challenge WhibOx Contest 2021, which consisted of designing and breaking white-box ECDSA implementations, so called challenges. We illustrate our results and findings by means of the submitted challenges and provide a comprehensive overview which challenge could be solved in which way. Furthermore, we analyze selected challenges in more details.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2022-08-16: last updated
2022-04-12: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/448
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/448,
      author = {Sven Bauer and Hermann Drexler and Maximilian Gebhardt and Dominik Klein and Friederike Laus and Johannes Mittmann},
      title = {Attacks Against White-Box ECDSA and Discussion of Countermeasures - A Report on the WhibOx Contest 2021},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/448},
      year = {2022},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/448}
}
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