Quantum computers pose a significant threat to widely used cryptographic schemes, making it crucial to urgently shift to post-quantum protocols that ensure the long-term security of communications. This paper presents a framework for facilitating the transition to a quantum-resistant web by enabling the evaluation of the impact of integrating post-quantum and hybrid cryptographic primitives in the TLS protocol. By leveraging the OpenSSL library, the framework enables the seamless evaluation and comparison of key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and signature schemes provided by the Open Quantum Safe project. The proposed framework is used to analyze different TLS configurations involving classic, hybrid and post-quantum primitives, with a focus on those selected by NIST. The study concentrates on evaluating the performance impact and the data overhead introduced by configurations involving primitives at different security levels. It starts by benchmarking standalone cryptographic primitives and continues with the evaluation of TLS configurations with hybrid and post-quantum KEMs under controlled network conditions, as this is the first natural step for a transition to a quantum-safe TLS. An impact analysis on real-world scenarios follows. Finally, our evaluation concentrates on providing insight into the cost of shifting to TLS configurations involving only hybrid or post-quantum primitives.
Quantum computers pose a significant threat to widely used cryptographic schemes, making it crucial to urgently shift to post-quantum protocols that ensure the long-term security of communications. This paper presents a framework for facilitating the transition to a quantum-resistant web by enabling the evaluation of the impact of integrating post-quantum and hybrid cryptographic primitives in the TLS protocol. By leveraging the OpenSSL library, the framework enables the seamless evaluation and comparison of key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and signature schemes provided by the Open Quantum Safe project. The proposed framework is used to analyze different TLS configurations involving classic, hybrid and post-quantum primitives, with a focus on those selected by NIST. The study concentrates on evaluating the performance impact and the data overhead introduced by configurations involving primitives at different security levels. It starts by benchmarking standalone cryptographic primitives and continues with the evaluation of TLS configurations with hybrid and post-quantum KEMs under controlled network conditions, as this is the first natural step for a transition to a quantum-safe TLS. An impact analysis on real-world scenarios follows. Finally, our evaluation concentrates on providing insight into the cost of shifting to TLS configurations involving only hybrid or post-quantum primitives.
The transition to a quantum-resistant Internet is a complex process that depends on the integration of post-quantum cryptographic primitives into existing security protocols. This paper analyzes the impact that the primitives selected by NIST in their post-quantum cryptography competition has on a critical Internet security protocol, the TLS protocol. The analysis is facilitated by a framework that enables the implementation of an evaluation scenario in which different post-quantum primitives can be tested under identical conditions, ensuring a fair comparison. Our results indicate that the computational overhead introduced by current post-quantum standards in TLS is comparable to that of traditional algorithms, and even more efficient at high security levels. However, their significant impact on data transmission constrains the transition to a full-fledged quantum-safe web.
The rapid advancement of quantum computing threatens the security foundations of today’s communication protocols. On the web, the traditional approach to securing web traffic has been to couple HTTP with TLS over TCP, but QUIC over UDP has recently emerged as an alternative to reduce latency and improve performance over unreliable networks. The need for an urgent transition to quantum-resistant web protocols demands further examination of both stacks. Consequently, in this work we evaluate their performance when combined with post-quantum primitives. To this end, we devise a practical evaluation framework that integrates the cryptographic primitives into TLS and QUIC implementations. Our analysis focuses on comparing the impact of hybrid and post-quantum primitives on TLS and QUIC under both ideal and realistic network conditions, providing quantitative insights into the performance cost and feasibility of transitioning toward a post-quantum web. Our results indicate that hybrid KEMs incur the highest handshake latency and bandwidth overhead, while pure post-quantum KEMs offer a favorable trade-off between security and performance, with only moderate costs. Moreover, QUIC consistently reduces the performance penalty of post-quantum primitives compared to TLS, especially in lossy network environments.
The advancement of quantum computing creates a big threat to classical cryptographic protocols, including TLS, which is responsible for secure internet communications. While recent industry and academic efforts have focused on integrating lattice-based post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) such as Kyber+X25519 into hybrid TLS handshakes, these approaches often prioritize performance at the cost of cryptanalytic diversity. Code-based KEMs, despite their proven security measure they remain underexplored in hybrid frameworks due to some limitations like large key sizes and integration complexity. This paper proposes a novel hybrid TLS framework that explicitly incorporates code-based post-quantum cryptography—specifically McEliece—alongside classical key exchange mechanisms. The framework introduces a dual-handshake mechanism, adaptive parameter selection, and seamless fallback negotiation, enabling flexible deployment across heterogeneous networks while ensuring backward compatibility. Integration with Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNGs) and multifactor authentication further increases entropy quality and session security. We implemented and evaluated the framework using an OpenSSL-OQS integration. We measure handshake latency, CPU utilization, memory usage, and throughput across emulated and real-world testbeds. Results show that the proposed hybrid approach achieves up to 30% lower latency and significantly reduced resource overhead compared to pure post-quantum TLS variants, while maintaining near-classical efficiency levels. Mathematical modeling formalizes these trade-offs which offers a foundation for optimizing deployment in both resource-constrained IoT devices and high-performance servers. By advancing cryptographic diversity and aligning with emerging NIST and IETF standardization efforts, the proposed framework provides a practical pathway toward quantum-resilient secure communication.It shows that code-based post-quantum cryptography can be added to current TLS systems without any problems, keeping security, performance, and compatibility in mind as we get ready for the quantum age.
We benchmark the TLS 1.3 handshake using post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, including both key encapsulation mechanisms and digital signature schemes, and compare them against traditional, non-quantum-safe counterparts. Our evaluation covers all FIPS-approved post-quantum standards (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA), as well as a selection of digital signature schemes from second-round candidates of the NIST PQC competition that are available in the liboqs library from the Open Quantum Safe project. To assess real-world performance, we simulate various network conditions (rate, delay, and losses) and analyze the impact of post-quantum cryptography on TLS connection latency.
The emergence of quantum computing presents a significant threat to classical cryptographic primitives, particularly those employed in securing internet communications via widely used protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS). As conventional key exchange mechanisms will become increasingly vulnerable in the post-quantum era, the integration of post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms into existing security protocols is of utmost importance. This study investigates the impact of incorporating PQC key encapsulation mechanisms—specifically, the recent standards CRYSTALS-Kyber and HQC, in conjunction with the candidate standard BIKE—into the TLS 1.3 handshake. A comprehensive experimental evaluation was conducted to measure handshake latency under emulated network conditions with varying packet loss probabilities. The findings offer useful insights into the performance trade-offs introduced by PQC integration and further highlight the necessity of a timely transition to post-quantum cryptographic standards.
This thesis investigates the current state of Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in the industry, with a particular focus on its practical deployment, integration challenges, and performance implications.The study combines a structured analysis of academic literature, standardization efforts, and industry guidance with an experimental evaluation of PQC integration in widely used security protocols. The analysis shows that, while significant progress has been made in the standardization of quantum-resistant algorithms such as ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA, real-world adoption remains in an early and transitional phase. Organizations primarily focus on evaluation and pilot implementations, as deployment is constrained by interoperability issues, implementation maturity, and the complexity of migrating existing cryptographic infrastructures.To complement the conceptual analysis, experimental measurements were conducted for TLS, SSH, and IPsec to evaluate the performance impact of hybrid post-quantum cryptographic mechanisms. The results indicate that performance overhead is not uniform across components. In particular, post-quantum signature schemes introduce significant computational and network overhead, mainly due to increased key and certificate sizes. In contrast, hybrid key exchange mechanisms show only moderate performance impact across all evaluated protocols.The findings highlight that the primary challenge of PQC adoption lies not in algorithm design but in practical integration and large-scale migration. Hybrid cryptographic approaches emerge as the most viable strategy for enabling a gradual transition, balancing improved security against quantum threats with operational feasibility.Overall, this thesis demonstrates that PQC is transitioning from a theoretical research field to a practical engineering challenge, with significant implications for the future design of secure communication systems.