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Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management

Post-Quantum Lightweight Key Sharing Protocol for Secure MQTT-Based IoT Networks

Sharadadevi Kaganurmath, Nagaraj Cholli, Anala M r

Published May 3, 2025• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract The Post-Quantum Lightweight Key Sharing Protocol for Secure MQTT-Based IoT Networks (PQLKS-MQTT) addresses the critical need for quantum-resistant and resource-efficient security in IoT communications. As the proliferation of IoT devices continues, securing MQTT-based networks against evolving threats, including quantum attacks, becomes imperative. PQLKS-MQTT integrates the Kyber Key Encapsulation Mechanism for post-quantum key exchanges, along with BLAKE2s hashing and ChaCha20 encryption, to ensure robust security with minimal resource consumption. Implemented using the Cooja simulator with Contiki OS, Eclipse Mosquitto MQTT broker, and Open Quantum Safe (liboqs) library, the protocol demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art solutions. Experimental results show that PQLKS-MQTT achieves the lowest CPU energy consumption (0.0000021 mJ), fastest execution time (0.35 seconds), and minimal computational (260 CPU cycles) and communication overheads (55 bytes), with only a slight increase in average energy consumption (0.00145 mJ) due to post-quantum cryptographic operations. This balance between enhanced security and efficient resource utilization makes PQLKS-MQTT a suitable solution for resource-constrained IoT devices and large-scale deployments, offering a scalable, quantum-safe communication framework for future IoT ecosystems.

DOI
10.52783/jisem.v10i42s.7914

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Abstract The Post-Quantum Lightweight Key Sharing Protocol for Secure MQTT-Based IoT Networks (PQLKS-MQTT) addresses the critical need for quantum-resistant and resource-efficient security in IoT communications. As the proliferation of IoT devices continues, securing MQTT-based networks against evolving threats, including quantum attacks, becomes imperative. PQLKS-MQTT integrates the Kyber Key Encapsulation Mechanism for post-quantum key exchanges, along with BLAKE2s hashing and ChaCha20 encryption, to ensure robust security with minimal resource consumption. Implemented using the Cooja simulator with Contiki OS, Eclipse Mosquitto MQTT broker, and Open Quantum Safe (liboqs) library, the protocol demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art solutions. Experimental results show that PQLKS-MQTT achieves the lowest CPU energy consumption (0.0000021 mJ), fastest execution time (0.35 seconds), and minimal computational (260 CPU cycles) and communication overheads (55 bytes), with only a slight increase in average energy consumption (0.00145 mJ) due to post-quantum cryptographic operations. This balance between enhanced security and efficient resource utilization makes PQLKS-MQTT a suitable solution for resource-constrained IoT devices and large-scale deployments, offering a scalable, quantum-safe communication framework for future IoT ecosystems.
The rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a critical threat to classical cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC, particularly in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where secure communication is essential but often constrained by limited computational resources. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms on resource-constrained devices. In particular, we implement three PQC algorithms - BIKE, CRYSTALS-Kyber, and HQC - on a lightweight IoT platform built with Raspberry Pi devices. Leveraging the Open Quantum Safe (liboqs) library in conjunction with mbedTLS, we develop quantumsecure key exchange protocols, and evaluate their performance in terms of computational overhead, memory usage, and energy consumption for quantum secure communication. Experimental results demonstrate that the integration of PQC algorithms on constrained hardware is practical, reinforcing the urgent need for quantum-resilient cryptographic frameworks in next-generation IoT devices. The implementation of this paper is available at https://iqsec-lab.github.io/PQC-IoT/.
The rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a critical threat to classical cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC, particularly in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where secure communication is essential but often constrained by limited computational resources. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms on resource-constrained devices. In particular, we implement three PQC algorithms - BIKE, CRYSTALS-Kyber, and HQC - on a lightweight IoT platform built with Raspberry Pi devices. Leveraging the Open Quantum Safe (liboqs) library in conjunction with mbedTLS, we develop quantumsecure key exchange protocols, and evaluate their performance in terms of computational overhead, memory usage, and energy consumption for quantum secure communication. Experimental results demonstrate that the integration of PQC algorithms on constrained hardware is practical, reinforcing the urgent need for quantum-resilient cryptographic frameworks in next-generation IoT devices. The implementation of this paper is available at https://iqsec-lab.github.io/PQC-IoT/.
The rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a critical threat to classical cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC, particularly in Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where secure communication is essential but often constrained by limited computational resources. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms on resource-constrained devices. In particular, we implement three PQC algorithms -- BIKE, CRYSTALS-Kyber, and HQC -- on a lightweight IoT platform built with Raspberry Pi devices. Leveraging the Open Quantum Safe (\texttt{liboqs}) library in conjunction with \texttt{mbedTLS}, we develop quantum-secure key exchange protocols, and evaluate their performance in terms of computational overhead, memory usage, and energy consumption for quantum secure communication. Experimental results demonstrate that the integration of PQC algorithms on constrained hardware is practical, reinforcing the urgent need for quantum-resilient cryptographic frameworks in next-generation IoT devices. The implementation of this paper is available at https://iqsec-lab.github.io/PQC-IoT/.
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 of127.3 ms,412.7 ms127.3 ~\text{ms}, 412.7 ~\text{ms}127.3 ms,412.7 ms, and1,847.2 ms1,847.2 ~\text{ms}1,847.2 ms, 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%23.5 \%-40.5 \%23.5%−40.5%relative to pure PQC, achieved through our hybrid optimization approach, while maintaining 94.2 % throughput efficiency.
Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a common communication protocol used in the Internet of Things (IoT). MQTT is a simple, lightweight messaging protocol used to establish communication between multiple devices relying on the publish–subscribe model. However, the protocol does not provide authentication, and most proposals to incorporate it lose their lightweight feature and do not consider the future risk of quantum attacks. IoT devices are generally resource-constrained, and postquantum cryptography is often more computationally resource-intensive compared to current cryptographic standards, adding to the complexity of the transition. In this paper, we use the postquantum digital signature scheme CRYSTALS-Dilithium to provide authentication for MQTT and determine what the CPU, memory and disk usage are when doing so. We further investigate another possibility to provide authentication when using MQTT, namely a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) trick proposed in 2020 for transport level security (TLS). Such a trick is claimed to save up to 90% in CPU cycles. We use the postquantum KEM scheme CRYSTALS-KYBER and compare the resulting CPU, memory and disk usages with traditional authentication. We found that the use of KEM for authentication resulted in a speed increase of 25 ms, a saving of 71%. There were some extra costs for memory but this is minimal enough to be acceptable for most IoT devices.
The explosion of constrained IoT devices with limited resources has increased the necessity of having efficient security measures to counter both the classical and new quantum threat. In this paper, we introduce Q-IoTGuard, a simple quantum cryptography platform that can be used in heterogeneous IoT networks. The model combines entanglement-assisted quantum key distribution (QKD) with lattice-based post-quantum encryption (PQC) in order to guarantee secure communication with a minimum of computational and energy overhead. The methodology commences with data preprocessing, in which the traffic of IoT and characteristics of the devices are organized, standardized and filtered in order to support the efficient cryptographic operations. Raw data is first fed into quantum-assisted key generation with simplified BB84 protocols with error correction and privacy amplification. Lightweight PQC encrypts then message providing resistance against quantum-enabled attacks. The simulation outcomes show that Q-IoTGuard has a low-key generation time, low latency, low-energy consumption, and high quantum attack resistance among sensors, actuators, and gateway devices. The flow-based architecture, which incorporates preprocessing, key gen, and lightweight encryption would make the framework practical to be deployed on resource-constrained IoT devices. Q-IoTGuard is a new scalable and energy-efficient system of securing next-generation IoT networks that addresses the gap between theoretical quantum security and the practical implementation.