The imminent threat of quantum computing necessitates the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to secure critical infrastructure, particularly within mobile Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments. This study validates the feasibility of such an integration through a detailed performance analysis of a PQC-secured communication architecture. A virtualized testbed was developed to simulate a network of Mobile Manufacturing Trucks (MMTs), acting as IIoT clients using Node-RED, transmitting real-time sensor data to a central Security Operations Center (SOC) running a Mosquitto MQTT broker. The security of the data channel is enhanced via an applicationlayer hybrid scheme that augments a standard TLS connection with the NIST-standardized ML-KEM-768 key encapsulation mechanism, orchestrated by distributed C-based cryptographic services. Performance evaluations of this end-to-end system yielded highly positive results. The mean end-to-end responsiveness was measured at 108.80 ms, successfully meeting the sub- 300 ms requirement for real-time industrial applications. Analysis of the latency distribution revealed a realistic network jitter profile, with a small number of outliers, while the majority of transmissions remained well below 150 ms. Furthermore, CPU utilization on all virtual machines remained minimal, confirming the computational efficiency of ML-KEM for resource-constrained edge devices. These findings provide strong quantitative evidence that a hybrid PQC approach is a viable and performant solution for securing mobile IIoT systems, aligning with the principles of the IEC 62443 standard. This work establishes a practical blueprint for deploying quantum-resistant protocols, with future research directed toward hardware-based validation, the integration of PQC digital signatures, and AI-driven anomaly detection.
The imminent threat of quantum computing necessitates the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to secure critical infrastructure, particularly within mobile Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments. This study validates the feasibility of such an integration through a detailed performance analysis of a PQC-secured communication architecture. A virtualized testbed was developed to simulate a network of Mobile Manufacturing Trucks (MMTs), acting as IIoT clients using Node-RED, transmitting real-time sensor data to a central Security Operations Center (SOC) running a Mosquitto MQTT broker. The security of the data channel is enhanced via an applicationlayer hybrid scheme that augments a standard TLS connection with the NIST-standardized ML-KEM-768 key encapsulation mechanism, orchestrated by distributed C-based cryptographic services. Performance evaluations of this end-to-end system yielded highly positive results. The mean end-to-end responsiveness was measured at 108.80 ms, successfully meeting the sub- 300 ms requirement for real-time industrial applications. Analysis of the latency distribution revealed a realistic network jitter profile, with a small number of outliers, while the majority of transmissions remained well below 150 ms. Furthermore, CPU utilization on all virtual machines remained minimal, confirming the computational efficiency of ML-KEM for resource-constrained edge devices. These findings provide strong quantitative evidence that a hybrid PQC approach is a viable and performant solution for securing mobile IIoT systems, aligning with the principles of the IEC 62443 standard. This work establishes a practical blueprint for deploying quantum-resistant protocols, with future research directed toward hardware-based validation, the integration of PQC digital signatures, and AI-driven anomaly detection.
The integration of NIST-standardized lattice-based cryptographic algorithms (ML-KEM and ML-DSA) into TLS 1.3 enables post-quantum secure authentication for Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments. This work implements these algorithms within the X.509 certificate infrastructure and evaluates their performance on resource-constrained IIoT hardware (Raspberry Pi 4). Experimental measurements covering key generation, encapsulation, decapsulation, and signature operations were obtained using a liboqs-enabled TLS 1.3 stack. The results show that PQ TLS 1.3 achieves comparable handshake latency to conventional TLS on IIoT-class gateways, with certificate size identified as the dominant overhead. These findings confirm the practicality of post-quantum authentication in IIoT systems while acknowledging limitations related to the hardware scope and simulated networking. Future work will extend validation to field deployments and additional PQC candidates.
The emergence of quantum computing poses an existential threat to current Internet of Things security infrastructure, which relies predominantly on RSA and elliptic curve cryptography for confidentiality and authentication. Shor's algorithm enables polynomial-time factorization that can break these classical cryptographic primitives, necessitating urgent migration to quantum-resistant alternatives. This paper presents the first comprehensive performance evaluation of six NISTstandardized and candidate post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms (ML-KEM-512, ML-KEM-768, NTRU-Prime-hrss, BIKE-L1, HQC-128, Classic-McEliece-348864) integrated into the MQTT protocol across 4,608 experimental configurations spanning diverse real-world network conditions. We systematically evaluate connection establishment latency, message delivery reliability, decryption computational overhead, and throughput stability under systematically varied network latency (10-150 ms representing LAN to satellite links), packet loss rates (0-10% spanning excellent to degraded connectivity), payload sizes (128-1024 bytes covering sensor telemetry to multimedia streams), and message transmission rates (1-10 Hz from periodic monitoring to real-time control). Statistical analysis of 622,080 MQTT messages totaling 384 hours of simulation time reveals that NTRU-Prime-hrss achieves optimal performance-security balance with 98.1% delivery ratio and 26.1 ms median handshake latency across all tested conditions, while Classic-McEliece exhibits 278.3 ms handshake overhead rendering it impractical for resourceconstrained deployments despite offering conservative security margins. We demonstrate through generalized linear modeling that transport-layer effects (TCP retransmissions, TLS record framing overhead) dominate post-quantum cryptographic computational costs, accounting for approximately 70% of endto-end latency in high-loss scenarios. Our novel three-gate decision framework provides quantitative deployment criteria for IoT operators balancing security requirements against operational constraints. Complete implementation, experimental dataset, and analysis scripts available at https://github.com/ vssk18/PQSM-RESEARCH.
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 of127.3ms,412.7ms, and1,847.2ms, 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%relative to pure PQC, achieved through our hybrid optimization approach, while maintaining 94.2 % throughput efficiency.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) introduces significant computational and communication overhead, which poses challenges for resource-constrained computer systems, Internet of Things (IoT), and Industrial IoT (IIoT) devices. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the Quantum Encryption Resilience Score (QERS) applied to MQTT, HTTP, and HTTPS communication protocols operating under PQC. Using an ESP32-C6 client and an ARM-based Raspberry Pi CM4 server, latency, CPU utilization, RSSI, energy consumption, key size, and TLS handshake overhead are measured under realistic operating conditions. QERS integrates these heterogeneous metrics into normalized Basic, Tuned, and Fusion scores, enabling systematic comparison of protocol efficiency and security resilience. Experimental results show that MQTT provides the highest efficiency under PQC constraints, while HTTPS achieves the highest security-weighted resilience at the cost of increased latency and resource consumption. The proposed framework supports informed protocol selection and migration planning for PQC-enabled IoT and IIoT deployments.
The convergence of quantum computing and the scale of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments creates a compounded security problem: classical public-key cryptography securing today’s IoT traffic is vulnerable to harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks, while the constrained hardware typical of IoT devices limits the security mechanisms can be deployed. Prior work has largely evaluated post-quantum cryptography (PQC), federated learning (FL)-based anomaly detection, and quantum-resilient storage separately or in partial combinations, leaving open whether these mechanisms remain practical when composed on constrained hardware under a shared operational budget. This paper answers that question with a three-layer architecture — a hybrid PQC pipeline (Kyber-based key encapsulation, ML-DSA signatures, AES-GCM encryption, and PQC-TLS transport), a federated anomaly-detection layer, and a quantum-resilient storage and audit layer (DeSSE and MuReQua) — executed end-to-end on a Raspberry Pi 5 edge node under AWS IoT Greengrass Core, with nine concurrent virtual IoT nodes processing real attack traffic from the N-BaIoT and TON_IoT datasets. Benchmarking across 27 cryptographic algorithm combinations (810 pipeline executions) shows that all 27 configurations completed in under 2.1 ms, with the deployed Kyber768/ML-DSA-65/AES-256-GCM tier adding 4,521 bytes of per-message overhead, which remained compatible with the evaluated 20 ms inter-row transmission budget. Live federated deployment across the nine virtual IoT nodes on N-BaIoT achieves F1-scores above 0.998 on eight of nine devices, processing at approximately 900 rows/second with zero signature verification failures; a centralized baseline evaluation further confirms 99.46% attack recall on unseen TON_IoT threats withheld from training. The quantum-resilient storage layer maintains 100% chain integrity and complete signature coverage across 4,471 audit records, with independent tamper simulations reliably detected. PQC-TLS introduces a one-time handshake overhead of 13.7 ms (288.5% relative increase) over classical TLS, which remains small relative to the multi-minute FL round intervals measured in the evaluated deployment. Together, these results demonstrate that quantum-resilient cryptography, federated intelligence, and auditable storage can be jointly executed on constrained IoT edge hardware as a single experimentally demonstrated pipeline within the operational conditions evaluated in this study.
The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced millions of resource-constrained devices into critical infrastructures, consumer environments, and industrial systems. These devices rely on lightweight communication protocols such as MQTT to support low-power, intermittent, and bandwidth-limited operation. However, common TLS algorithms used to secure MQTT communications are vulnerable to quantum attacks made feasible by Shor's algorithm. As a result, IoT infrastructures must evaluate and adopt post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) methods capable of providing long-term resilience. This report investigates the implementation of PQC algorithms within an MQTT-based IoT networks using three Raspberry Pis. Specifically, it integrates the FALCON digital signature scheme, one of NIST's selected post-quantum signature algorithms, to maintain message authenticity and integrity across resource-constrained MQTT clients and brokers. By measuring system performance, the research characterizes the practical trade-offs of deploying lattice-based PQC on lightweight hardware.