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.
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.
Quantum computers could break currently used asymmetric cryptographic schemes in a few years using Shor's algorithm. They are used in numerous protocols and applications to secure authenticity as well as key agreement, and quantum-safe alternatives are urgently needed. NIST therefore initiated a standardization process. This requires intensive evaluation, also with regard to performance and integrability. Here, the integration into TLS 1.3 plays an important role, since it is used for 90% of all Internet connections. In the present work, algorithms for quantum-safe key exchange during TLS 1.3 handshake were reviewed. The focus is on the influence of dedicated network parameters such as transmission rate or packet loss in order to gain insights regarding the suitability of the algorithms under corresponding network conditions. For the implementation, a framework by Paquin et al. was extended to emulate network scenarios and capture the handshake duration for selected algorithms. It is shown that the evaluated candidates Kyber, Saber and NTRU as well as the alternative NTRU Prime have a very good overall performance and partly undercut the handshake duration of the classical ECDH. The choice of a higher security level or hybrid variants does not make a significant difference here. This is not the case with alternatives such as FrodoKEM, SIKE, HQC or BIKE, which have individual disadvantages and whose respective performance varies greatly depending on the security level and hybrid implementation. This is especially true for the data-intensive algorithm FrodoKEM. In general, the prevailing network characteristics should be taken into account when choosing scheme and variant. Further it becomes clear that the performance of the handshake is influenced by external factors such as TCP mechanisms or MTU, which could compensate for possible disadvantages due to PQC if configured appropriately.
The anticipated emergence of a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC) would fundamentally compromise much of the security used in public key cryptography today. Traditional cryptographic systems, commonly used for key exchanges and digital signatures, are therefore vulnerable. Efforts to standardize and migrate to post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) alternatives require rigorous empirical evaluation to ensure that these new methods in which we place our security are not vulnerable to quantum computers or less secure than the traditional systems that they aim to replace. This thesis explores one method of combining the security of today’s key exchanges with that of the newly standardized post-quantum alternatives using a hybrid approach within the Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 protocol. This was implemented into MbedTLS, and tests were conducted to evaluate the impact of different hybrid key combinations in a simulated network environment with restrictive Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) sizes and higher levels of packet loss. The results indicated that the TCP segmentation introduced by the limiting MTU was the greatest factor affecting the TLS 1.3 handshake latency when performed over lossy networks.
Aim: The imminent advent of large-scale quantum computers within the next years is expected to highly affect the security of several cryptosystems that are now considered secure; this mainly holds for classical, long-established, public key cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. Apparently, any security protocol that relies on such ciphers, including the transport layer security (TLS) protocol which constitutes a somewhat de facto standard for the security on the web, will not be considered secure in the post-quantum era. To alleviate the security risks stemming from quantum computing, several proposals have been submitted to the relevant procedure initiated by NIST towards evaluating and standardizing one or more quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms. This paper focuses on embedding post-quantum secure cryptographic algorithms into the TLS protocol to analyze its performance. More precisely, the paper aims to analyze whether this transition to post-quantum secure algorithms will have a significant impact on the user experience due to the possible increase of client--server communication times. Methods: Having as the starting point several important works in the field, several experiments were carried out, using combinations of cloud and local virtual machines per case and considering all the post-quantum cryptographic algorithm finalists for key exchange from the third round of the ongoing NIST process, for various cryptographic as well as network parameters. Results: Our results exhibit that, for key exchange in TLS, the best performance among the post-quantum secure ciphers is achieved by the Saber and CRYSTAL-Kyber variants for all security levels, regardless of the underlying computing power. The performance is comparable to that of the corresponding one achieved by a classical elliptic curve algorithm for key exchange for both RTT and packet loss ratio — i.e., the network parameters seem to have the same effect on post-quantum secure algorithms as in the case of a conventional elliptic curve algorithm. However, the effect of the network parameters on the performance is more crucial than the effect of the underlying chosen ciphers. Conclusion: According to the experiments, we conclude that there exist very promising algorithms that could be utilized in TLS in the near future, which may behave even better than the conventional elliptic curve algorithms for key exchange. It should also be pointed out that NIST announced on 5 July 2022 (i.e., after the completion of our research experiments) that, for general encryption used when we access secure websites, the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm has been selected, having as one of its advantages the speed of operation. Hence, the results of our paper are fully in line with the progress of the NIST process. Taking into account that the NIST process is still ongoing (now in its fourth round) with the aim to select more algorithms, as well as that some algorithms may be standardized outside NIST, it becomes evident that our results provide very useful insights on performance aspects of the post-quantum secure algorithms.
The advances in quantum computing present a threat to public key primitives due to their ability to solve hard cryptographic problems in polynomial time. To address this threat to critical Internet security protocols like the Transfer Layer Security (TLS), and Secure Shell (SSH), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is currently working on the new generation of quantum-resistant key encapsulation and authentication schemes. In this paper, we evaluate protocol handshake performance when both post-quantum key exchange and authentication are integrated into TLS and SSH. Our experiments consider realistic network conditions and reveal that the introduced handshake latency ranges between 1-300% for TLS and 0.5-50% for SSH depending on the post-quantum algorithms used. In addition, we examine how the initial TCP window size affects post-quantum TLS and SSH performance, and show that even a small size increase can reduce the observed post-quantum slowdown by 50%. Finally, we discuss alternatives that can encourage the early adoption of post-quantum cryptography with minimum protocol performance degradation.
Currently available cryptographic algorithms such as the RSA, Diffie-Hellman and the ECC are used in securing most Internet communications across the Internet. Theoretical quantum algorithms (and the Shor algorithm in particular) were demonstrated to be able to efficiently break that type of classical cryptography as soon as large-scale quantum computers are developed. To handle this new emerging security problem, PQC has been proposed as a class of cryptographic algorithms that is resistant to both quantum and classical attackers. It is a research paper offering and experimentally implementing a hybrid PQC-TLS protocol in a heterogeneous network architecture which includes edge computing devices and cloud computing and IoT devices. The suggested architecture integrates both lattice-based CRYSTALS-Kyber key encapsulation scheme and CRYSTALS-Dilithium digital signature scheme in the TLS 1.3 handshake without being interoperable with the older ECC-based key exchange schemes. Five measures of performance that included handshake latency, CPU consumption, memory consumption, bandwidth overhead and energy consumption were analyzed in detail through experimentation. The experiments were conducted using in Iot, edge and cloud nodes under controlled conditions that were repeated a number of times to give reliability in the statistics. The results indicate that the integration of PQC has moderate overhead (mean increase in latency about 1517) and decent computational and energy requirements. Another method of resisting popular attacks on networks like as the man in the middle, replay, and downgrade attacks, is security validation. The findings indicate that quantum resilient secure communication migration to a heterogeneous distributed infrastructure can be practically and scalably provided using hybrid PQC-TLS protocols. Statistical analysis including standard deviation and 95% confidence intervals was performed to validate the reliability of the results.
The emergence of quantum computing presents a critical threat to classical cryptographic schemes such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which underpin protocols such as TLS 1.3. This study proposes and evaluates an optimized integration of the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm within the Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 protocol for resource-constrained IoT devices. The objective is to achieve quantum-resistant security while maintaining practical performance on embedded hardware. Using the Open Quantum Safe library and OpenSSL, the implementation is bench marked on Raspberry Pi and ARM Cortex platforms under real-world constraints. Key findings demonstrate that Kyber512 achieves a favorable balance between performance and post-quantum security, with low handshake latency, peak memory usage under 22 KB, and energy consumption as low as 0.36 mJ per handshake. A hybrid implementation combining Kyber with Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral (ECDHE) ensures backward compatibility while enabling 128-256 bit quantum-safe security. Empirical validation confirms constanttime execution, side-channel resistance (p>0.05over 100 K traces), and robust operation under packet loss. These results establish CRYSTALS-Kyber as a viable candidate for postquantum secure communication in constrained IoT environments.