Abstract
Elliptic curve scalar multiplication (ECSM) stands as a crucial
sub-block in elliptic curve cryptography, which represents the most
widely-used pre-quantum public key cryptography. Hardware constructions
of cryptographic systems utilizing ECSM have been subject to permanent
or transient errors. In cryptographic systems, it is important to
validate the correctness of the underlying computation performed on
hardware or software to identify such errors. In this paper, we present
new fault detection schemes in window method scalar multiplication,
which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been previously
investigated. Our approach involves introducing refined algorithms and
implementations that can effectively counter both permanent and
transient errors. We assess this by simulating a fault model, ensuring
that the evaluations conducted reflect the obtained results. As a
result, we achieve a significantly extensive coverage of errors. Lastly,
we benchmark our proposed error detection scheme on ARMv8 and FPGA to
demonstrate the implementation and resource overhead. On Cortex-A72
processors, we maintain a clock cycle overhead of under 3%.
Additionally, when implementing our error detection method on different
FPGAs including Zynq Ultrascale+, Artix-7, and Kintex Ultrascale+, we
achieve comparable throughput while introducing a mere 2% increase in
area compared to the original hardware implementations.