Core engineering and protocols for Side-Channel Masking Defenses.
When ML-KEM runs on smart cards or embedded microcontrollers, adversaries can measure instantaneous power consumption or electromagnetic emissions. Correlation Power Analysis (CPA) correlates observed power traces with Hamming weight models of secret polynomial operations, recovering secret keys in minutes.
MLKEMSafe implements first-order and second-order masking, splitting each secret coefficient into multiple independent shares using fresh randomness from an on-chip TRNG. Polynomial operations are performed across the shares independently, ensuring that power dissipation is statistically independent of the underlying secret key.