Profiling Dilithium Digital Signature Traces for Correlation Differential Side Channel Attacks

A significant concern for the candidate schemes of the NIST postquantum cryptography standardization project is the protection they support against side-channel attacks. One of these candidate schemes currently in the NIST standardization race is the Dilithium signature scheme. This postquantum signature solution has been analyzed for side channel attack resistance especially against timing attacks. Expanding our attention on other types of side-channel analysis, this work is focused on correlation based differential side channel attacks on the polynomial multiplication operation of Dilithium digital signature generation. In this paper, we describe how a Correlation Power Attack should be adapted for the Dilithium signature generation and describe the attack process to be followed. We determine the conditions to be followed in order for such an attack to be feasible, (isolation of polynomial coefficient multiplication inpower traces) and we create a power trace profiling paradigm for the Dilithium signature scheme executed in embedded systems to showcase that the conditions can be met in practice. Expanding the methodology of recent works that mainly use simulations for power trace collection, in this paper, power trace capturing and profiling analysis of the signature generation process was succesfully done on a, noisy, Commercial off-the-shelf ARM Cortex-M4 embedded system.