3D hardware shielding stops side-channel attacks on quantum-safe cryptography
Side-Channel Attack Prevention for Post Quantum Cryptography Algorithms: A 3D-Shield Approach
Cryptography and SecurityEmerging Technologies
Summary
Quantum-safe cryptography protects information from future quantum computers, but hackers can still attack devices by spying on secret processes inside the hardware. The authors propose using 3D stacking of computer chips with extra fake secret keys and physical shielding to block these spying attempts. This approach works alongside other protection methods and was tested on a critical math step called the Number Theoretic Transform. Their results show the new shielding helps hide sensitive computations from side-channel attacks.
What this means in practice
- •For hardware security engineers: Use 3D chip stacking and decoy key techniques to enhance side-channel resistance in cryptographic devices running post-quantum algorithms.
- •For embedded system designers: Integrate dedicated NTT processor chips with physical 3D shielding to protect critical computations in post-quantum cryptographic implementations.
Authors
Carl Benda, Eren Kurshan, Aydin Aysu, Paul Franzon
Abstract
Despite their theoretical quantum attack resistance, practical implementations of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms remain susceptible to side-channel attacks. This includes all standard algorithms selected the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) such as Kyber/ML-KEM, Dilithium/ML-DSA, Falcon/FN-DSA and SPHINCS+/SLH-DSA. This paper proposes an alternative defense for side-channel resilience based on 3D integration that uses 3D hardware to shield the underlying cryptographic activity by introducing decoy keys and physical shielding through stacking. The proposed approach can complement other security measures (such as masking and shuffling) on protecting Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) that move computation to dedicated NTT chips. We outline the construction of our approach and validate the effectiveness on a generic attack targeting intermediate computation inside an NTT butterfly.