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Symposium on Optical Fiber Measurements (SOFM)

Quantum cryptography in optical networks and supporting metrology

R.J. Runse, K. Tyagi, Philip A. Hiskett, Kevin P. McCabe, P. Toliver, Scott R. McNown, Thomas E. Chapuran, Matthew S. Goodman, J. Jackel, Richard Hughes, J. E. Nordholt, Charles G. Peterson

Published Jan 1, 2004• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

While the need to provide security has long been a critical driver for the design and architecture of govemment networks, it is also becoming increasingly important to provide secure networking for commercial services over today’s infrastructure. Supporting electronic financial transactions, virtual private networks (VPNs), and virtual local area networks (VLAM) over a shared network are some of the key drivers for security on today’s large service provider and carrier networks. These services today typically depend ou cryptographic algorithms which rely on mathematical or computational complexity for providing security. The conditional security guarantees of these “classical” cryptographic methods are predicated on specific assumptions related to future advances in toth mathematical techniques and computation. However, the difficulty in predicting future breakthroughs in mathematical methods and computation may limit the applicability of today’s cryptographic techniques to future security needs.

DOI
10.1109/sofm.2004.183497

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While the need to provide security has long been a critical driver for the design and architecture of govemment networks, it is also becoming increasingly important to provide secure networking for commercial services over today’s infrastructure. Supporting electronic financial transactions, virtual private networks (VPNs), and virtual local area networks (VLAM) over a shared network are some of the key drivers for security on today’s large service provider and carrier networks. These services today typically depend ou cryptographic algorithms which rely on mathematical or computational complexity for providing security. The conditional security guarantees of these “classical” cryptographic methods are predicated on specific assumptions related to future advances in toth mathematical techniques and computation. However, the difficulty in predicting future breakthroughs in mathematical methods and computation may limit the applicability of today’s cryptographic techniques to future security needs.
Building-Wide Virtual Private Network (VPN) systems leverage the current communication infrastructure to connect various IoT devices and management systems through encrypted tunnels. These systems are essential for protecting sensitive data and ensuring operational security but face imminent threats from quantum computers capable of breaking widely-used public key cryptography. In this paper, we propose a lightweight hybrid post-quantum security framework specifically designed for building-wide IoT VPN systems, which combines classical cryptographic primitives (e.g., ECDH) with selected post-quantum crypto (PQC) algorithms (e.g., Kyber, Dilithium). This dual-layer architecture ensures protection against both current and future quantum threats, relying on the hardness of at least one underlying cryptographic assumption for security. Furthermore, the framework incorporates lightweight design principles tailored for resource-constrained IoT environments. These principles emphasize minimal computational demands, reduced communication costs, and limited protocol complexity. Specifically, its lightweight nature reflects simplification to the VPN protocol’s operations and the selected integration of post-quantum algorithms. This optimized application of PQC simplifies the cryptographic workload for key exchange and signature, thereby balancing security guarantees with feasible deployment on IoT hardware. Our analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves quantum resistance with manageable performance impact compared to traditional VPNs, making it a practical and scalable solution for migrating existing building management infrastructures towards post-quantum security across diverse IoT devices.
Most of themainstream cryptographic protocols that are used today rely on the assumption that the adversary has limited computational power, and that a given set of mathematical problems is hard to solve (on average), i.e. that there is no polynomial time algorithm that solves these problems. While these assumptions are reasonable for now they might not be as relevant for long termsecurity. Indeed, all the communication that happens today can be recorded by an adversary who can later – when the technology allows it – break security. There are good reasons to think that technological progress may lead to break the assumptions made today. For example the rapidly increasing computational power of our computer already allows one to break anything that has been encrypted using DES in the 70s and 80s in few days using regular desktop type devices. There is also the constant improvement of the efficiency of the known algorithms that solve a class of problems. Note that, even though the discovery of a polynomial algorithm for a problem we believe to be hard is still possible, much weaker improvements on current algorithms that solve these hard problems, can already be a threat for security.
Motivation The ability to guarantee security and privacy in communication are critical factors in encouraging people to accept and trust new tools and methods for today's information-based society (e.g. in eCommerce or eHealth) and for future services (e.g. eGovernment, eVoting). Cybercrime already hinders these new possibilities by creating widespread mistrust in these new services. Another problem is that a (perhaps unpublicized) break-through in mathematics or computer science could completely compromise current state-of-the-art encryption methods overnight, even those which are the basis of all existing internet banking transactions. This is because the security of cutting-edge public-key cryptography (conventional cryptography) relies on the computational difficulty of certain mathematical tasks, meaning that conventional cryptography alone can neither provide any evidence of eavesdropping nor guarantee strong security. The trend towards faster electronics provides the ability to handle longer keys, thus providing better security, but also increases the possibility to break keys. This also has another worrying effect: even using today's most advanced available security technology to protect data during communication with best practice and without making any mistakes, the ongoing improvements in technology (which hence require longer key lengths to ensure security) mean that today's transmitted data will not be secure for more than a few years. Thus, while encrypted data might be safe today, it can still be stored by the adversary now and then broken later on once the future technology has caught up with today's encryption. Alternatively, modern quantum cryptography has created a new paradigm for cryptographic communication, which provides strong, long-term security and incontrovertible evidence of any attempted eavesdropping which is based on theoretically and experimentally proven laws of nature.
In the future quantum computing era,there will be security risks in the authentication and key exchange links of constructing Virtual Private Network(VPN).Therefore,a VPN enhanced security architecture based on Quantum Secure Key Management Service(QS-KMS) is established to implement quantum security solutions based on quantum cryptography.A global unified backend QS-KMS service is used to provide authentication and session key for IPSec VPN to decouple VPN services from physical layer quantum devices.In view of the complex working conditions and strong environmental interference of power overhead fiber optic cables,the QS-KMS key pool dynamic key management technology and post-quantum cryptography technology are applied to keep the key pool sufficient to ensure the stable operation of VPN.On this basis,the effective quantum security VPN service in the power communication network is realized.Test results show that this method can meet the needs of power grid control communication.