Ensuring the confidentiality of communication is of paramount significance. Traditionally, cryptographic practices for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been primarily based on classical cryptography like RSA and Elliptic Curve, which are potentially susceptible to cyber attacks from future quantum computers with enough computing power. To ensure the protection and safety of inter-node communication in WSNs, it becomes imperative to employ a Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithm. This paper presents post-quantum low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (PQ-LEACH), an advanced secure wireless communication protocol based on the LEACH protocol. By integrating post-quantum cryptography, specifically Kyber’s key encapsulation method, and a key update system, PQ-LEACH effectively enhances the security of communication and mitigates various WSN attacks. Additionally, a comprehensive performance analysis of PQ-LEACH, including its impact on network energy efficiency and longevity, is conducted. The results demonstrate the trade-offs between enhanced security measures and operational performance, providing critical insights for the deployment of secure and efficient WSNs in a quantum-threatened landscape.
Ensuring the confidentiality of communication is of paramount significance. Traditionally, cryptographic practices for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have been primarily based on classical cryptography like RSA and Elliptic Curve, which are potentially susceptible to cyber attacks from future quantum computers with enough computing power. To ensure the protection and safety of inter-node communication in WSNs, it becomes imperative to employ a Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithm. This paper presents post-quantum low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (PQ-LEACH), an advanced secure wireless communication protocol based on the LEACH protocol. By integrating post-quantum cryptography, specifically Kyber’s key encapsulation method, and a key update system, PQ-LEACH effectively enhances the security of communication and mitigates various WSN attacks. Additionally, a comprehensive performance analysis of PQ-LEACH, including its impact on network energy efficiency and longevity, is conducted. The results demonstrate the trade-offs between enhanced security measures and operational performance, providing critical insights for the deployment of secure and efficient WSNs in a quantum-threatened landscape.
Quantum computing poses a significant threat to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) by undermining traditional cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). This work proposes a quantum-safe architecture for WSNs that integrates post-quantum cryptography (PQC) with lightweight IoT protocols to ensure long-term confidentiality, authenticity, and resilience. The framework leverages ML-KEM for key encapsulation and ML-DSA/SLH-DSA for signatures, and seamlessly integrates with EDHOC, OSCORE, and COSE. A novel Efficient Adaptive Parameter Selection (EAPS) mechanism dynamically adjusts cryptographic strength to balance security, energy consumption, and latency under varying network conditions. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that ciphertext fragmentation (8–27 pieces) results in manageable completion times of 4–10 seconds, while join operations consume only 0.005–0.03 J per cryptographic handshake event, while system-level energy consumption including network overhead is higher (~1.0–1.4 J per join cycle depending on hop count and retransmissions). Battery lifetime projections under steady-state sensing workloads range from approximately 115–280 months for low-duty-cycle operation, whereas realistic deployment conditions with periodic communication yield effective lifetimes of 11.5–24 months. Security analysis confirms robust resistance against downgrade attacks and Harvest-Now-Decrypt-Later (HNDL) threats. Moreover, EAPS reduces risk scores by over 50% compared to fixed schemes with less than 10% additional energy overhead, and batch signature verification improves scalability by increasing throughput from ~1,600 to ~2,800 verifications per second. Overall, the proposed framework demonstrates that WSNs can achieve quantum-resistant security with minimal performance trade-offs, ensuring readiness for the post-quantum era.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are systems made up of sensor nodes that communicate wirelessly over short distances, with adaptability and functionality at their coreessence. These networks have traits. Face challenges in devising effective strategies for identifying and thwarting attacks due to limitations, in individual sensor node processing power and the essence of wireless communication. Securing WSN poses a challenge given the constrained processing abilities of sensor nodes and the inherent nature of communication while facing various security threats that have emerged alongside the widespread adoption of these networks. To protect against these dangers it's crucial to put in place the security measures Encryption's key, to keeping data safe from unauthorized users Nevertheless not all encryption methods are equally strong as some are vulnerable Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is considered the best option due to its smaller key sizes offering strong security with efficiency in space and energy As technology advances conventional encryption techniques are seen as inadequate, for ensuring data privacy and security Utilizing principles from physics to ensure data transmission, between the sender and receiver is a groundbreaking advancement in network security known as quantum cryptography. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) combined with ECC is highlighted in this study, for authentication processes, key management and energy efficiency. A novel method called QKD ECC has been put into practice. Compared against ECC and other encryption methods to bolster the security of WSN and safeguard the confidentiality of data exchange.
The requirement of efficient security protocols to protect confidential information from ever evolving cyber threat has been highlighted by the fast implementation of wireless sensor network (WSN) in numerous important domains, including healthcare monitoring, environmental surveillance and military operations. Despite their feasibility, traditional cryptographic approaches are utilized behind the computing capability of recent attackers, including the possibility of future quantum computer attacks. In order to revolutionize WSN security, this study proposes utilizing quantum cryptography and other concepts from quantum computing into the existing framework. This research leads to develop a communication protocol that is extremely safe and against the cyber-attacks. This protocol utilizes the quantum key distribution (QKD) to protect data and granting its confidential. In addition to improving security, the new architectures begin with change that makes WSN more capable of dependable and secure operations in environment where data protection is essential. A complete framework for protecting WSNs from new cyber threats in the future while keeping data transmissions and efficient process with reliability is discussed in this study. This proposed method enhances the dependencies in WSN installation across various industries, which is important for applications that need strong security measures. Evaluation results shows that the proposed method outperformed all existing methods in terms of relevant metrics.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are quiet dynamic technology made up of discrete multi-function sensor nodes that interconnect wireless for short distances. WSNs have distinct traits as well as limitations that impede the development of efficient attack detection and prevention methods. Security in WSN is a more difficult task because of the processing limits of sensor nodes as well as the nature of wireless communications. The widespread WSNs usage has given development to several forms of threats. To guard against threats, appropriate security measures must be implemented. Cryptography, specifically encryption, plays a pivotal role in protecting data from unauthorized access. However, not all encryption methods are equally effective, as some exhibit vulnerabilities. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is the most efficient option because of its reduced key size. Comprehensive safety despite lower key sizes leads to area as well as power efficient crypto systems. With recent technological advancements, traditional encryption no longer appears to be a safe solution for security and privacy of data. Quantum cryptography uses quantum physics processes to provide safe data transmission among sender and recipient. However, quantum cryptography comprises a revolution over network security field. Therefore, this research focuses on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) with ECC for effective authentication, key management and energy conservation. Thus, the proposed QKD-ECC method is implemented and evaluated with traditional ECC and other cryptography method for better WSN security and privacy of data transmission.
The potential of the swift development of quantum computing is an extreme danger to the traditional cryptographic programs, and they are the foundation of the modern communication infrastructure. RSA and ECC are classical public-key algorithms that can be successfully quantum-attacked, in particular, Shor's algorithm can easily factor large integers and calculate discrete logarithms (Bernstein et al., 2017). The Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) has become the key to secure the next-generation communication networks against these threats, which relies on lattice problem-based algorithms, hash-based based algorithms, multivariate polynomials-based algorithms, and code-based cryptography. The paper examines the concepts, design, and implementation issues of PQC within current network infrastructure focusing on the secure transmission of data, authentication, and key management in the upcoming 5G and 6G networks. The approach will include the survey of existing algorithms of PQC, model the integration of protocol in the communication systems and test computational efficiency, security strength, and scalability. It has been found that PQC is suitable to protect network communications against quantum attackers, and achieves reasonable performance, though trade-offs can be seen in terms of computation overhead, key size, and latency. The research offers understanding to the researcher, network engineers and policy makers in order to adopt quantum resistant cryptography protocols to secure the confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of information in the future communication networks.
Recent advances in quantum computing have prompted urgent consideration for the migration of classical cryptographic systems to post-quantum alternatives. However, it is impossible to fully understand the impact that migrating to current Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms will have on various applications without actual implementation of quantum-resistant cryptography. On the other hand, PQC algorithms come with complexity and long processing times, which may impact the Quality of Service (QoS) of many applications. Therefore, PQC-based protocols with practical implementation across various applications are essential. This paper introduces a new framework for PQC standalone and PQC-AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) hybrid Public Key Encryption (PKE) protocols. Building on prior results, we focus on securing applications such as file transfer, video streaming, and chat-based communication using enhanced PQC-based protocols. The extended PQC-based protocols use a sequence number-based mechanism to effectively counter replay and man-in-the-middle attacks and mitigate standard cybersecurity attack vectors. Experimental evaluations examined encryption/decryption speeds, throughput, and processing overhead for these standalone PQC and PQC-AES hybrid schemes, benchmarking them against traditional AES-256 in an existing client-server environment. The results demonstrate that the new approaches achieve a significant balance between security and system performance compared to conventional deployments. Furthermore, the comprehensive security analysis confirms the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed PQC-based protocols across diverse attack scenarios. Notably, the PQC-AES hybrid protocol demonstrates greater efficiency for applications handling larger data volumes (e.g., 10–100 KB) with reduced latency, underscoring the practical necessity of carefully balancing security and operational efficiency in the post-quantum migration process.