Post-quantum cryptography is rapidly moving from research into production silicon, placing new demands on hardware roots of trust. Adams Bridge, the ML-DSA accelerator within the Caliptra 2.0 architecture, illustrates how architectural decisions, countermeasure trade-offs and interface design choices can introduce exploitable weaknesses. Analysis of the protected implementation shows how partial masking, verification semantics and hardware-software boundaries affect resilience against fault injection and side-channel leakage.

In this session, Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen, professor of practice at Tampere University, will share insights on:

• Architectural risks in post-quantum hardware roots of trust;
• Verification semantics and malformed signature handling;
• Pre-silicon leakage assessment and FPGA-based validation.