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Non-profiled Single-Trace ML-DSA Secret Key Recovery by Horizontal Distribution Analysis
eprint.iacr.orgpaper

Non-profiled Single-Trace ML-DSA Secret Key Recovery by Horizontal Distribution Analysis

Non-profiled single-trace side-channel attack on ML-DSA-65 (Dilithium) running on ARM Cortex-M4, by Linus Backlund and Elena Dubrova (KTH). It compares observed sample distributions with expected Hamming weight leakage using a Gaussian mixture model, and stacks partitioned trace segments for multiple observations. Information-set decoding corrects misclassifications; with a 2^70 enumeration budget, the full secret key is recovered from one trace in 99% of attacks, using secret key unpacking as the attack point.

TL;DR Shows single-trace secret key recovery on ML-DSA-65 on Cortex-M4 without profiling or a clone device, using a Gaussian mixture model and information-set decoding.
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Organisations named here

  • Dilithium
  • Elena Dubrova
  • Hamming weight leakage
  • horizontal attack
  • information-set decoding
  • Linus Backlund
  • non-profiled attack

Technologies named here

  • Gaussian mixture model
  • Information-set decoding algorithms
  • ML-DSA, post-quantum signature scheme
  • ML-DSA
  • Arm Cortex-M4

Techniques named here

  • Horizontal distribution analysis

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