DUMMY PARTIAL MULTIPLICATION OF ZERO-OPERANDS AS A LOW-COST MEANS FOR REDUCING THE SUCCESS OF SCA ATTACKS AGAINST ECC

A device for performing accelerated elliptic curve point multiplication determines for each of the iterations of a main loop operation sequence a respective set of respective dummy clock cycle positions, and controls computational blocks to perform a partial multiplication of zero-operands in dummy clock cycles corresponding to the respective determined dummy clock cycle positions of the set of dummy clock cycle positions for the respective main loop iteration. For any of the sets that has two or more dummy clock cycle positions within the same main loop iteration, each two of the dummy clock cycle positions are separated from each other by at least one clock cycle of performing a partial multiplication of non-zero operands, and at least two of the sets of the dummy clock cycle positions differ from each other.