Securing bandwidth-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) and edge networks during post-quantum migration creates an authentication trade-off: ML-KEM provides post-quantum key establishment, whereas post-quantum signatures increase certificate-chain size, verification cost, and handshake latency. We present HPQ-AKE, a sign-less hybrid authenticated key exchange for RSA-enabled IoT gateways and edge/cloud services that replaces transcript signatures with dual KEMs. HPQ-AKE combines ML-KEM-768 for post-quantum session secrecy and forward secrecy with RSA-OAEP for implicit mutual authentication, preserving existing RSA-enabled infrastructure during migration. We analyze HPQ-AKE in an extended Bellare-Rogaway model, separating classical authentication in the Random Oracle Model from session-key secrecy in the Quantum Random Oracle Model. Under the Module-LWE and RSA assumptions, it establishes AKE security, forward secrecy, and conditional KCI resistance under the long-term-key-only exposure assumptions. Evaluation combines x86 micro-benchmarking, analytical latency modeling, and 10,000-iteration Monte Carlo simulation. HPQ-AKE reduces modeled handshake transmission from 13,009 to 5,668 Bytes, a 56.4% reduction relative to a Hybrid TLS 1.3 Full handshake, while requiring 7.11 ms of total local computation on the measured x86 testbed. Under a simulated 50 kbps satellite-like link with 600 ms RTT and stochastic jitter, median latency is 1,914 ms, 31.4% below the 2,791 ms baseline. At 20 ms RTT, modeled break-even thresholds are 0.31 Mbps against the pre-cached baseline and 4.08 Mbps against the full baseline; both decrease as RTT increases. These x86-based results motivate evaluation on gateway-class IoT and edge platforms; performance on ARM gateways and unaccelerated microcontrollers remains unvalidated.
Securing bandwidth-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) and edge networks during post-quantum migration creates an authentication trade-off: ML-KEM provides post-quantum key establishment, whereas post-quantum signatures increase certificate-chain size, verification cost, and handshake latency. We present HPQ-AKE, a sign-less hybrid authenticated key exchange for RSA-enabled IoT gateways and edge/cloud services that replaces transcript signatures with dual KEMs. HPQ-AKE combines ML-KEM-768 for post-quantum session secrecy and forward secrecy with RSA-OAEP for implicit mutual authentication, preserving existing RSA-enabled infrastructure during migration. We analyze HPQ-AKE in an extended Bellare-Rogaway model, separating classical authentication in the Random Oracle Model from session-key secrecy in the Quantum Random Oracle Model. Under the Module-LWE and RSA assumptions, it establishes AKE security, forward secrecy, and conditional KCI resistance under the long-term-key-only exposure assumptions. Evaluation combines x86 micro-benchmarking, analytical latency modeling, and 10,000-iteration Monte Carlo simulation. HPQ-AKE reduces modeled handshake transmission from 13,009 to 5,668 Bytes, a 56.4% reduction relative to a Hybrid TLS 1.3 Full handshake, while requiring 7.11 ms of total local computation on the measured x86 testbed. Under a simulated 50 kbps satellite-like link with 600 ms RTT and stochastic jitter, median latency is 1,914 ms, 31.4% below the 2,791 ms baseline. At 20 ms RTT, modeled break-even thresholds are 0.31 Mbps against the pre-cached baseline and 4.08 Mbps against the full baseline; both decrease as RTT increases. These x86-based results motivate evaluation on gateway-class IoT and edge platforms; performance on ARM gateways and unaccelerated microcontrollers remains unvalidated.
Post-quantum authenticated key exchange is needed for Internet of Things (IoT) systems facing quantum-enabled adversaries, but signature-heavy post-quantum handshakes remain costly for constrained devices and long-delay non-terrestrial network (NTN) links. This paper proposes NTN-PQ-AKE, a lightweight, transcript-bound authenticated key exchange for managed IoT/NTN deployments. The protocol avoids online post-quantum signatures by combining the Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) with provisioned symmetric token material, replay-window checking, transcript-bound derivation using the HMAC-based Key Derivation Function (HKDF), and two-way confirmation tags. Its principal novelty relative to the KEM-based baselines considered here is the joint provision of pair-scoped pre-authentication before ML-KEM processing, complete binding of the key-establishing transcript, and fail-closed two-way key confirmation for managed IoT/NTN deployments. Its “authenticate first, compute later” design rejects forged initiations before expensive KEM processing, while each endpoint releases local session keys only after verifying the role-specific peer confirmation for the same transcript-derived state. Security analysis under a Dolev–Yao adversarial model shows that, within the stated freshness and provisioning assumptions, NTN-PQ-AKE supports mutual authentication, KEM-derived session-key freshness for uncompromised sessions, replay and man-in-the-middle resistance, transcript integrity, and scoped resource-exhaustion mitigation; it does not claim full perfect forward secrecy after later endpoint-key compromise. Across 100 measured runs after five warm-up runs, hardware profiling on an STM32F407G-DISC1 Cortex-M4 gives a mean combined Alice-and-Bob handshake cost of 3,812,967 cycles (SD 13,420; 95% CI half-width 2,662), or 22.70 ms at 168 MHz, with 52,356 B of text, 136 B of data, and 68,664 B of bss. OMNeT++ evaluation shows that NTN-PQ-AKE transmits 2,472 bytes and completes in approximately 524.67 ms on the modeled NTN channel.
The emergence of quantum computing threatens classical cryptographic systems, including RSA and ECC, potentially compromising the security of pervasive Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. Resourceconstrained IoT devices—such as sensors, embedded controllers, and microcontrollers—face significant challenges in adopting post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) protocols due to computational, memory, and energy limitations. This paper proposes AQ-PQC, an adaptive lightweight hybrid key exchange protocol combining Kyber lattice-based KEM and lightweight elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), specifically designed for constrained devices. AQ-PQC introduces a dynamic parameter tuning algorithm that adjusts key sizes, handshake rounds, and compression ratios based on real-time device state and network conditions. Formal security analysis under the IND-CCA model demonstrates quantum-resistance and forward secrecy. Extensive hardware implementation on Raspberry Pi 4 and ESP32 devices reveals a significant reduction in handshake latency, energy consumption, and memory footprint compared to conventional PQC protocols. The proposed framework provides a practical, reproducible, and secure methodology for post-quantum IoT communications, supporting heterogeneous and resource-limited networks.
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that use the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol poses significant security challenges in the emerging quantum computing era. Current Transport Layer Security (TLS) implementations rely on classical cryptographic algorithms vulnerable to Shor's algorithm. This paper proposes PQ-MQTT, a hybrid post-quantum secure communication protocol that integrates ML-KEM-768 with X25519 for key encapsulation and a lightweight session-key derivation mechanism optimized for resource-constrained IoT publishers. We present a formal security analysis under the Quantum Random Oracle Model (QROM), demonstrating resilience against store-now-decryptlater attacks. Experimental evaluation on the Raspberry Pi 4, ESP32, and Arduino Nano 33 platforms shows that PQ-MQTT achieves handshake latencies of127.3ms,412.7ms, and1,847.2ms, respectively, with 18.2 KB of additional memory overhead. A comparative analysis of pure post-quantum and classical TLS implementations shows energy reductions of23.5%−40.5%relative to pure PQC, achieved through our hybrid optimization approach, while maintaining 94.2 % throughput efficiency.
Current cellular authentication mechanisms rely primarily on SIM-based Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA), which have scaled successfully worldwide but face challenges as the Internet of Things (IoT) grows to billions of devices. SIM provisioning and lifecycle management become increasingly costly, while reliance on long-term symmetric keys limits revocation flexibility and cross-operator support. To address these issues, we propose a SIM-less, certificate-based authentication framework that integrates Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Specifically, the framework employs Kyber for key encapsulation and Dilithium for digital signatures, providing quantum-resistant protection for future networks. A key challenge is the computational overhead of PQC on constrained IoT devices; we address this by offloading cryptographic operations to trusted edge servers, whose integrity is validated using attestation mechanisms such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) or secure enclaves. We implement and evaluate the framework in a simulated FutureG environment, comparing IoT-only execution against edge-assisted configurations. Results show that edge offloading reduces TLS handshake latency by up to 96% while maintaining minimal resource usage on devices. These findings demonstrate that PQC-enabled PKI, combined with edge-assisted execution, offers a scalable and practical complement to SIM/AKA for secure and quantum-resilient authentication in FutureG IoT deployments.
This paper introduces PQ-LiteKEM, a formally verified, lightweight post-quantum security protocol for energy- and resource-constrained Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. Addressing near-term quantum threats and emerging regulatory mandates such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act, the protocol mitigates the ‘harvest-now-decrypt-later’ (HNDL) quantum threat by securing sensitive physiological data over low-powered wireless channels. PQ-LiteKEM's architecture pairs lightweight symmetric-key mutual authentication, tied to dynamic hardware fingerprints, with ML-KEM-512 encapsulation and AES-256-GCM authenticated encryption. Formal verification through ProVerif and Scyther confirms security against key compromise, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks, with provable session forward secrecy, mutual authentication, and session integrity. PQ-LiteKEM is validated on an ESP32-S3-powered wearable sensor communicating with a Raspberry Pi edge gateway over a BLE testbed. Performance profiling measured a total cryptographic latency of 5.9 ms and a peak memory footprint of 9 kB, approximately 0.1% of available RAM. These results show that post-quantum cryptographic guarantees are achievable on constrained medical sensors without sacrificing runtime efficiency, and that the approach generalises beyond BLE to other wireless channels.
The imminent advent of quantum computing threatens the long-term security of classical public-key cryptography, creating critical challenges for resource-constrained internet of things (IoT) environments.Hybrid cryptographic frameworks combining elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) primitives have emerged as a transitional solution; however, their security properties remain insufficiently validated under semi-trusted infrastructure assumptions.This paper presents a comprehensive security evaluation of a hybrid ECC-KEM authentication and key agreement framework targeting IoT deployments.Using a dual-verification methodology that integrates formal symbolic analysis with the Tamarin-Prover and practical AI-assisted testing via the APSVer tool, we identify a critical impersonation vulnerability that enables a semi-trusted third party (TTP) to reconstruct PUF-based authentication material.To mitigate this flaw, we introduce a protocol enhancement incorporating ML-DSA post-quantum digital signatures and device-isolated key derivation.Formal verification confirms that the enhanced protocol achieves mutual authentication, session key secrecy, replay resistance, and effective isolation of the TTP.Experimental performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed security improvements introduce only a 12%-15% computational overhead, preserving feasibility for constrained IoT devices.The proposed framework provides a practical, quantum-resilient authentication architecture suitable for next-generation secure IoT deployments.