Fault Attacks on ECC Signature Verification
Digital signatures used in embedded systems are often based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) thanks to its performance and low memory profile. In secure boot processes they provide the cryptographic foundation for guaranteeing the authenticity of a firmware image. At the same time, these resource-constraints and the physical exposure of such devices makes them prime targets for fault attacks. Prior work studied faults on signature generation in depth, yet nobody had systematically asked how vulnerable signature verification is to fault attacks combined with carefully crafted signature inputs. That is exactly the gap we set out to close.
