Kim Young-beom, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cybersecurity and a member of our university’s Cryptography and Security Engineering Research Lab (CSE; Advisor: Seo SeogChung), presented a paper on hardware security for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) titled “CMALU: Compact Fault-Tolerant Modular Arithmetic Unit” at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD 2026, a BK21 Plus-designated premier academic conference). The paper, titled “CMALU: Compact Fault-Tolerant Modular Arithmetic Logic Unit for Post-Quantum Cryptography,” will be presented at ICCAD 2026.
 
This research stems from the recognition that, as post-quantum cryptography enters the stage of being implemented and deployed in actual hardware, physical attacks targeting the hardware implementations are emerging as a new threat, separate from the security of the algorithms themselves. In particular, fault injection attacks—in which an attacker uses voltage glitches or lasers to intentionally introduce errors into the computational process—can lead to the recovery of secret keys with just a single error in the modular arithmetic unit, which is central to post-quantum cryptographic operations. Therefore, countermeasures at the hardware level are essential for real-world deployment.
 
Based on this research direction, this paper points out the limitations of existing countermeasures—which relied on redundant computations or the addition of separate verification circuits—in resource-constrained environments, and proposes a lightweight fault-tolerant modular arithmetic unit (CMALU) architecture to address these limitations. By reconfiguring the ALU data path itself to enable error detection, the proposed architecture ensures resilience against error-injection attacks while minimizing area and performance losses. This presents a practical fault-tolerant design approach that can be effectively applied to quantum-resistant cryptographic hardware in resource-constrained environments.
 
This research was conducted through an international collaboration with researchers from the Centre for Secure Information Technologies at Queen’s University Belfast in the United Kingdom and the University of Idaho in the United States, with Ph.D. candidate Kim Young-beom serving as the first author and Professor Seo Seok-chung as the corresponding author.
 
Led by Professor Seo SeogChung, our university’s Cryptography and Security Engineering (CSE) Laboratory is actively conducting research focused on the optimization of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and the migration of security protocols in both software and hardware environments. The laboratory plans to continue expanding its implementation and validation research to advance the practical application of post-quantum cryptography.