Differential Fault Attacks on Elliptic Curve Cryptosystems

In this paper we extend the ideas for differential fault attacks on the RSA cryptosystem to cryptosystems using elliptic curves. We present three different types of at­tacks that can be used to derive information about the secret key if bit errors can be inserted into the elliptic curve computations done in a tamper-proof device. The effec­tiveness of the attacks was proven in a software simula­tion of the described ideas.