Presentation
A Remote Side-Channel Attack on Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanisms: A Case Study of ML-KEM on Intel x86
DescriptionAs post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) schemes are standardized, evaluating their resilience to side-channel attacks (SCA) becomes critical. While most prior studies focus on physical SCAs, the practicality of remote SCAs on full implementations of standardized PQCs remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present the first generic remote power SCA on the Module-Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM), evaluated on a modern Intel x86 processor. Our result demonstrates that power traces can be exploited remotely as a plaintext-checking oracle, enabling secret key recovery despite the scheme's theoretical IND-CCA security. Using ML-KEM as a case study, we show that complex microarchitectural mechanisms such as speculative execution and dynamic power management do not eliminate exploitable power leakage. We evaluated our attack on the PQClean implementation, achieving secret key recovery with a success rate up to 99.5%. These findings provide a realistic assessment of PQC leakage behavior on high-end processors and underscore the need for architecture-aware leakage models and co-designed hardware–software defenses to ensure secure PQC deployment in practice.
Event Type
Research Manuscript
TimeTuesday, July 283:30pm - 3:42pm PDT
LocationMtg Room 203C