FORTRESS at MAgiCS 2026

On 10th May  FORTRESS partner PQShield presented two talks at the first edition of the MAgICS workshop. The keynote entitled “Designing a Post-Quantum Root of Trust: The Hardest Migration Problem You’re Not Aware of” and a contributed talk entitled “Apples, Oranges, and Signatures: Pitfalls and Methodology in ML-DSA Benchmarking”.

The keynote discussed the following:

• PQC transition is a regulatory imperative, driven by European mandates for hybrid cryptography.
• The primary bottleneck is redesigning the Root of Trust (RoT) and secure boot, not the algorithms.
• RoT’s immutability creates structural tension with the need for cryptographic agility.
• Hybrid integration into secure boot chains requires dual key hierarchies and increases computational overhead.
• Detailed overview of the FORTRESS research project

The contributed talk covered the first publicly reproducible benchmark of MLDSA with explicit worst case execution time.

Main contributions:

• Open source test vectors for MLDSA sign operation
• Open source benchmarking framework for ARM-Cortex-M and RISC-V MCUs
• Benchmarking results of open source MLDSA implementation as well as STM32PQC and WolfSSL libraries on STM32U5A5
• Explanation of the link between ASIL FIT budget and maximum rate of MLDSA signature

The slides are available here: https://github.com/sebastien-riou/BTVG-MLDSA/blob/main/2026-05-10%20-%20MAgiCS%20-%20MLDSA%20Sign%20Benchmarking.pdf

For more information: https://magics-workshop.cs.hs-rm.de.