Internship - Countermeasures against fault-injection attacks on post-quantum, hash-based signature verification

OUR STORY

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We are looking for an intern to study the fault resistance of post-quantum, hash-based signature verification. You will start from existing software work and explore how fault injection can impact signature checking, with the goal of understanding the practical robustness of these schemes and evaluating potential countermeasures.

Internship activities

• Study hash-based signatures in verification-only use cases.

• Build a software reference implementation for fault modeling.

• Define the fault model and identify relevant fault targets.

• Review literature on attacks against verification mechanisms

• Evaluate countermeasures and their suitability for hardware support.

• Optionally explore hash-chain hardware acceleration and new attack surfaces.

You will work in an international team, based in Italy and France, with strong expertise in cryptographic implementations, both in hardware, software, and microcontroller security. Duration: 6 months

Your profile

• Applied mathematics, computer science or electronics student graduating from a Master's Degree

• Knowledge of cryptography and embedded systems.

• Experience with software development in C or Python.

• Interest in hardware security and fault analysis.

• Knowledge of hash-based signature schemes is a plus

References

[1] Faulting Winternitz One-Time Signatures to forge LMS, XMSS, or SPHINCS+ signatures. Wagner et al., PQCrypto 2023
[2] Laser Fault Injection Attack on the eXtended Merkle Signature Scheme. Wagner et al., BSI Bund 2025

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To discover more, visit st.com/careers.