Structural Dependency Analysis for Masked NTT Hardware: Scalable Pre-Silicon Verification of Post-Quantum Cryptographic Accelerators

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 16 Apr 2026] Structural Dependency Analysis for Masked NTT Hardware: Scalable Pre-Silicon Verification of Post-Quantum Cryptographic Accelerators Ray Iskander, Khaled Kirah Post-quantum cryptographic accelerators require side-channel resistance evidence for FIPS 140-3 certification. However, exact masking-verification tools scale only to gadgets of a few thousand cells. We present a four-stage verification hierarchy, D0/D1 structural dependency analysis, fresh-mask refinement, Boolean Single-Authentication Distance Checking (SADC), and arithmetic SADC, that extends sound first-order masking verification to production arithmetic modules. Applied to the 1.17-million-cell Adams Bridge ML-DSA/ML-KEM accelerator, structural analysis completes in seconds across all 30 masked submodules. A multi-cycle extension (MC-D1) reclassifies 12 modules from structurally clean to structurally flagged. On the 5,543-cell ML-KEM Barrett reduction module, the pipeline machine-verifies 198 of 363 structurally flagged wires (54.5%) as first-order secure, reports 165 as candidate insecure for designer triage (a sound upper bound), and leaves 0 indeterminate. Every verdict is cross validated by Z3 and CVC5 with 0 disagreements across 363 wires. The result narrows manual review from hundreds of structural flags to 165 actionable candidates with mathematical certificates, enabling pre-silicon side-channel evidence generation on production ML-KEM hardware. Comments: 36 pages, 4 figures Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.15249 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.15249v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.15249 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Khaled Kirah Dr [view email] [v1] Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:25:01 UTC (821 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)