Masterthesis
In my masteryear i did my masterthesis at COSIC. Beneath you can find the summary of the work. For this thesis i worked together with my fellow student Steven Swinnen."COSIC is a research group of the electrical engineering department of the KULeuven. A part of their research is focused on the design, evaluation and implementation of cryptographic algorithms on electronic platforms. Since the introduction of power attacks on these platforms, many existing algorithms became unsafe. This master thesis aims at an implementation of an algorithm, based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography, to evaluate its security against power attacks. For this purpose an automated power measurement system is developed, during this master thesis.The software of the power measurement system is developed with LabVIEW. This software controls an Agilent oscilloscope and a specialized FPGA board. Afterwards we tested the power measurement system, using test algorithms implemented on the FPGA board. We did various power attacks on the implementation of the elliptic curve algorithm with our power measurement system and statistical calculations.While performing a simple power attack (SPA) on the existing elliptic curve implementation. This brought up a major implementation error. By adapting the implementation, we eliminated the error and the implementation became much safer. In addition, we did a comparative power analysis attack (CPA) on the same implementation. This attack revealed a portion of the secret information."This thesis was nominated for the BARCO price 2010 and the paul donners price 2010