Elena Dubrova
Elena Dubrova 01/01
Elena Dubrova received the Diploma Engineer degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1993, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Victoria, B.C., Canada, in 1998. Since 2008, she has been a professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. She has authored over 100 publications and holds 15 granted patents. Her work has been recognized with prestigious awards, such as the IBM Faculty Partnership Award for outstanding contributions to IBM research and development. She is ranked among the world’s top 2% of scientists according to the Stanford University 2020 ranking. Her research interests include hardware security, lightweight cryptography, logic synthesis, and multiple-valued logic.
Keynote: Physical Attacks on Implementations of Post-Quantum Cryptographic Algorithms
The emergence of quantum computing poses a threat to today's widely deployed public-key cryptographic systems, driving the urgent adoption of post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Over the past few years, PQC has rapidly progressed from academic research to standardization and real-world deployment. In August 2024, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its first PQC standards, standardizing the CRYSTALS-Kyber key encapsulation mechanism and the CRYSTALS-Dilithium digital signature scheme as ML-KEM and ML-DSA, respectively. The transition to these new cryptographic standards is now underway across industry and government.
Achieving secure and efficient implementations of PQC algorithms, however, remains a significant challenge. Beyond mathematical security, practical implementations must also withstand physical attacks that exploit unintended information leakage. Side-channel attacks exploit timing variations, power consumption, or electromagnetic emissions to recover secret information, while fault attacks deliberately induce errors during cryptographic computations to compromise security.
This talk presents recent advances in physical attacks on implementations of ML-KEM and ML-DSA. Through representative case studies, we examine how side-channel and fault attacks expose implementation vulnerabilities and discuss their implications for the secure deployment of post-quantum cryptography.