All public-key cryptography algorithms that are in use today, including RSA (Rivest–Shamir- Adleman) cryptosystem, DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm), and DH (Diffie-Hellman) key agreement, will be broken if quantum computers become a reality. Hence, applications and protocols must be transitioned to quantum-resistant designs. We consider post-quantum security of DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) for source authentication and message integrity. These are essential security requirements for control plane communications in 5G networks. To provide message integrity while avoiding costly post-quantum secure key exchange protocols that rely on unproven computational assumptions, we will use TESLA (Timed Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication) protocol. TESLA is a data stream authentication protocol that uses symmetric-key cryptographic primitives and a digital signature scheme to achieve security. We first replace the digital signature in TESLA with a hash-based one to achieve post-quantum security, and then carefully revise the DTLS handshake and record layer protocol to include the new TESLA protocol such that it delivers the same properties for DTLS. We argue our design’s security and show our model’s feasibility using an efficient implementation for an open-source DTLS library, called TinyDTLS. Finally, we provide performance measurements for PQ-DTLS compared with original DTLS in authentication and integrity only mode.
All public-key cryptography algorithms that are in use today, including RSA (Rivest–Shamir- Adleman) cryptosystem, DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm), and DH (Diffie-Hellman) key agreement, will be broken if quantum computers become a reality. Hence, applications and protocols must be transitioned to quantum-resistant designs. We consider post-quantum security of DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security) for source authentication and message integrity. These are essential security requirements for control plane communications in 5G networks. To provide message integrity while avoiding costly post-quantum secure key exchange protocols that rely on unproven computational assumptions, we will use TESLA (Timed Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication) protocol. TESLA is a data stream authentication protocol that uses symmetric-key cryptographic primitives and a digital signature scheme to achieve security. We first replace the digital signature in TESLA with a hash-based one to achieve post-quantum security, and then carefully revise the DTLS handshake and record layer protocol to include the new TESLA protocol such that it delivers the same properties for DTLS. We argue our design’s security and show our model’s feasibility using an efficient implementation for an open-source DTLS library, called TinyDTLS. Finally, we provide performance measurements for PQ-DTLS compared with original DTLS in authentication and integrity only mode.
Recent advances in quantum computing and Shor’s discovery of quantum algorithms that efficiently solve computational problems (integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems) form the basis of the Internet cryptographic infrastructure. It has fueled intensive research into the design and development of post-quantum (PQ) cryptographic systems that maintain their security when a quantum computer is built.We consider the PQ security of DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security), a communication security protocol that protects against eavesdropping, tampering, and packet forgery for datagrams. DTLS is the UDP counterpart of TLS (Transport Layer Security) and proposed to secure control messages in 5G networks. We offer a novel and efficient approach for providing secure source authentication and message integrity for DTLS that removes the need for a computationally expensive key exchange for message integrity by using PQ TESLA (Timed Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication) that relies on delayed key release mechanism to provide integrity and use a PQ hash-based signature for providing PQ source authentication. We analyze the security of our design, implement it in a widely used library called TinyDTLS, report the result of our experiments, and propose direction for future research.
Basic security requirements such as confidentiality, user authentication and data integrity, are assured by using public-key cryptography (PKC). In particular, public-key signature schemes provide non-repudiation, integrity of transmitted messages and authentication. The presence of a large scale quantum computer would be a real threat to break the most widely used public-key cryptographic algorithms in practice, RSA, DSA, ECDSA signature schemes and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Thus, all security protocols and applications where these public-key cryptographic algorithms are used are vulnerable to quantum-computer attacks. There are five directions of cryptographic primitives secure against a quantum computer: multivariate quadratic equation-based, hash-based, lattice-based, code-based and supersingular isogeny-based cryptography. These primitives could serve as replacements for current public-key cryptographic algorithms to prepare for post-quantum era. It is important to prioritize the fields to be replaced by post-quantum cryptography (PQC) since it is hard to replace the currently deployed PKC with PQC at the same time. The fields directly connected to human life such as vehicular communications should be the primary targets of PQC applications. This survey is dedicated to providing guidelines for adapting the most suitable post-quantum candidates to the requirements of various devices and suggesting efficient and physically secure implementations that can be built into existing embedded applications as easily as traditional PKC. It focuses on the five types of post-quantum signature schemes and investigates their theoretical backgrounds, structures, state-of-the-art constructions and implementation aspects on various platforms raging from resource constrained IoT devices to powerful servers connected to the devices for secure communications in post-quantum era. It offers appropriate solutions to find tradeoffs between key sizes, signature lengths, performance, and security for practical applications.
The current 5G-AKA protocol faces significant security challenges, including the lack of Perfect Forward Secrecy and Post-Quantum (PQ) security. In particular, the absence of PQ protection makes current communications vulnerable to future quantum adversaries who may decrypt stored messages once large-scale quantum computers become available. To mitigate this risk, a transition to PQ security must be implemented as soon as possible. Two primary approaches exist for this transition: (1) symmetric key-based techniques, which require a secure channel for key distribution, leading to increased costs, and (2) modern PQ public-key primitives, which offer stronger security but come with high communication overhead. In this paper, we propose a solution that leverages PQ cryptographic primitives for confidentiality and privacy protection, while retaining classical public-key cryptography for authentication. This approach is viable because digital signatures must be secure today, even if they are compromised in the future. Moreover, our framework allows for a seamless transition to fully PQ-secure authentication when quantum threats become imminent. In addition, the framework also supports the zero-trust architecture in which no secure channel between Serving Network (SN) and Home Network (HN) is assumed. We have carefully analysed the security of the proposed protocol using both informal and formal (Real-Or-Random (ROR) logic and Scyther Validation tool) methods. We also compared its performance in terms of computation, communication, and storage, and found that it performs better than existing protocols.
The prospect of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) undermines the public-key primitives that secure virtually every layer of modern communication networks, from subscriber authentication in cellular cores to transport-layer key exchange. Adversaries already following a harvest-now, decrypt-later (HNDL) strategy make this threat actionable today for any traffic whose confidentiality must outlast a decade. Following NIST’s finalisation of the first post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards, ML-KEM (FIPS 203), ML-DSA (FIPS 204), and SLH-DSA (FIPS 205) in August 2024, and the selection of HQC as a fourth key-encapsulation candidate in March 2025, research has shifted from algorithm design to network-level integration. This paper reports a PRISMA-2020-compliant systematic literature review of PQC migration in communication networks, structured around five research questions covering protocol and scenario coverage, quantitative performance impact, hybrid cryptography strategies, transition barriers, and open research gaps. Six databases (IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, and MDPI) were searched (3229 records identified); after deduplication, title-keyword screening, full-text eligibility assessment, and a pre-specified quality appraisal (Q1–Q6, threshold ≥3/6) applied to 310 eligible studies, a final synthesis corpus of 141 studies (68 journal articles, 68 conference papers, 4 conference-derived book chapters, 1 workshop paper) was screened, quality-appraised, and synthesised narratively with supporting evidence tables. The review finds that transport-layer protocols (TLS 1.3, QUIC, DTLS 1.3) dominate the literature, that lattice-based ML-KEM/ML-DSA offer the most favourable latency–bandwidth–energy trade-off among standardised families, and that classical–PQC hybrid schemes are the de facto transition strategy across 5G/6G, IoT, VPN, and automotive scenarios, at the cost of 10–100× larger keys/signatures and 8–40% handshake latency overhead. Persistent barriers include constrained-device resource limits, immature hardware acceleration, incomplete IETF/3GPP standardisation, and public-key-infrastructure scaling. We propose a five-level PQC transition-readiness maturity model and identify large-scale field validation, PQC–QKD integration, and lightweight signature schemes as priority directions for future work.
Cryptography has evolved from ancient substitution ciphers to modern mathematical algorithms including Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA), elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and advanced encryption standard (AES) that form the core of security systems, along with the major information security objectives: confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, availability, accountability, nonrepudiation, and privacy and their practical applications in protocols such as transport layer security (TLS), Internet Protocol Security (IPsec), and Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME). The security of RSA, ECC, and symmetric-key ciphers has been threatened by quantum computers that exploit Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms. In response to this quantum threat, NIST has standardized post-quantum cryptographic PQC) algorithms: ML-KEM, a lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism and ML-DSA, a lattice-based digital signature scheme. This chapter surveys the development of cryptographic systems from transposition ciphers to post-quantum cryptography, examining their mathematical foundations, operational mechanisms, and respective security properties. In addition to these, the PQC algorithms have been implemented in TLS 1.3, and a comparative analysis has been performed. The study traces the history of cryptography while understanding post-quantum standards as the necessary foundation for long-term information security in the quantum era.
Cyber physical systems (CPSs) will be deployed for decades, thus they should be secure against long-term attacks. Most CPSs adopt the datagram transport layer security (DTLS), as the de facto security protocol. By using public key cryptography (PKC) based on traditional RSA or elliptic-curves, DTLS establishes secured communication channels between multiple parties. However, the foreseeable breakthrough of quantum computers represents a risk for many PKC ecosystems. Traditional PKC will no be longer considered secure. Therefore, the integration of post-quantum security is mandatory. Due to their limited resources, tight performance requirements, and long-term life-cycles, this is especially challenging for CPSs. In this letter we propose, implement and evaluate for the first time a post-quantum enhanced DTLS, able to establish secure communications of CPSs, even in the presence of quantum computers. An NTRU post-quantum solution was used to perform the key transport among the CPSs entities. We show that is feasible to integrate our post-quantum enhanced DTLS, together with the full Internet engineering task force protocol stack in highly constrained environments, such as the CPSs.