International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is an efficient public cryptosystem with

a short key size. For this reason it is suitable for implementing on memory-constraint

devices such as smart cards, mobile devices, etc. However, these devices leak information

about their private key through side channels (power consumption, electromagnetic

radiation, timing etc) during cryptographic processing. In this paper we have examined

countermeasures against a specific class of side channel attacks (power analysis) called

Zero-Value Point Attack (ZVP), using elliptic curve isomorphism and isogeny. We found

that these methods are an efficient way of securing cryptographic devices using ECC

against ZVP attack. Our main contribution is to extend the work of Akishita and Takagi

[3,2] to binary fields. We also provide a more detail analysis of the ZVP attack over

prime fields.