Security of Prime Field Pairing Cryptoprocessor Against Differential Power Attack

This paper deals with the differential power attack on a pairing cryptoprocessor. The cryptoprocessor is designed for pairing computations on elliptic curves defined over finite fields with large prime characteristic. The paper pinpoints the vulnerabilities of such pairing computations against side-channel attacks. By exploiting the power consumptions, the paper experimentally demonstrates such vulnerability on FPGA platform. A suitable counteracting technique is also suggested to overcome such vulnerability. Bilinear pairing or pairing is a new and increasingly popular way of constructing cryptographic protocols. This has resulted in the development of pairing based schemes such as Identity Based Encryption (IBE) which are ideally used in identity aware devices.