Side Channel Attacks and Their Low Overhead Countermeasures on Residue Number System Multipliers

Due to the natural parallelism and the speed enhancement, Residue Number System (RNS) has been introduced to perform the modular multiplications in public-key cryptography. In this work, we examine the secure performance of RNS under side channel attacks, expose the vulnerabilities, and propose countermeasures accordingly. The proposed methods improve the resistance against side channel attacks without great area overhead or loss of speed performance, and are compatible to other countermeasures on both the logic level and the algorithm level. We prototype the proposed design on FPGA, and presented the implementation results confirm the efficiency of the proposed countermeasures.