Case Study: Horizontal Side-Channel Analysis Attack against Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication Accelerator under Laser Illumination

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 20 Mar 2026] Case Study: Horizontal Side-Channel Analysis Attack against Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication Accelerator under Laser Illumination Dmytro Petryk, Ievgen Kabin, Peter Langendoerfer, Zoya Dyka Devices employing cryptographic approaches have to be resistant to physical attacks. Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) and Fault Injection (FI) attacks are frequently used to reveal cryptographic keys. In this paper, we present a combined SCA and laser illumination attack against an Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication accelerator using a differential probe from Teledyne LeCroy. Our experiments show that laser illumination increases the power consumption of the chip, especially its static power consumption but the success of the horizontal power analysis attacks was changed insignificantly. We assume that using a laser with a high laser beam power and concentrating on measuring and analysing only static current can improve the attack success significantly. The horizontal attacks against public key cryptosystems exploiting the Static Consumption under Laser Illumination (SCuLI attacks) are novel and their potential is not investigated yet. These attacks can be especially dangerous against cryptographic chips manufactured in scaled technologies. If such attacks are feasible, appropriate countermeasures have to be proposed in the future. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.19811 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.19811v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.19811 Focus to learn more Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/LATS65346.2025.10963958 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Dmytro Petryk [view email] [v1] Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:56:20 UTC (916 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.AR References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)