Innovative Elliptic Curve Multiplication Design for Preventing Side-Channel Attacks Based on Variable Radix System

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a significant asymmetric encryption technique, with Elliptic Curve Multiplication (ECM) playing a fundamental role in ECC. However, the conventional ECM employs the Double-and-Add algorithm, which sequentially processes each private key bit, making it vulnerable to Side-Channel Attacks (SCAs). To address this issue, this paper proposes a method that transforms the private key into a variable-radix system for computation. By breaking the correlation between private key bits and power waveforms, this design effectively defends against various forms of SCAs, including Timing Attacks (TA), Simple Power Analysis (SPA), Differential Power Analysis (DPA), Doubling Attacks, and Zero Point Attacks (ZPA), and we implemented our design using TSMC 40nm process.