Detailed benchmark analysis of memory consumption, execution time, and battery life across ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers.
Medical microcontrollers often operate with 64 KB to 256 KB of RAM. Standard reference implementations of PQC algorithms require substantial stack space, risking stack overflow in safety-critical threads.
By performing Number Theoretic Transforms (NTT) in-place and streaming polynomial coefficients directly from flash memory, stack usage can be reduced by over 70%, allowing ML-KEM-512 to run comfortably within 6 KB of RAM.
Medical devices deployed in home environments are susceptible to physical side-channel attacks. Constant-time code execution and random mask jittering ensure that power analysis cannot extract private keys during key decapsulation.