Fault-Tolerant Finite Field Computation in the Public Key Cryptosystems

In this paper, we propose a new method for fault tolerant computation over GF (2) for use in public key cryptosystems. In particular, we are concerned with the active side channel attacks, i.e., fault attacks. We define a larger ring in which new computation is performed with encoded elements while arithmetic structure is preserved. Computation is decomposed into parallel, mutually independent, identical channels, so that fault effects do not spread to the other channels. By assuming certain fault models, our proposed model provides protection against their error propagation. Also, we provide an analysis of the error detection and correction capabilities of our proposed model.