Underwater communication (UWC) systems are critical for maritime exploration, environmental monitoring, and defense, yet their security remains vulnerable to quantum computing threats. Recent studies estimate that 65% of underwater infrastructure relies on classical cryptographic protocols, which could be compromised by quantum algorithms within the next decade. Existing solutions, such as ECC-based authentication and lightweight symmetric cryptography, lack scalability, quantum resistance, or resilience against adversarial attacks in highlatency underwater environments. To address this gap, this study proposes a Post-Quantum Authentication Protocol integrating NTRU lattice-based encryption and the Falcon hash function, designed to resist quantum attacks while operating efficiently in resource-constrained UWC networks. The proposed protocol leverages NTRU's hardness assumptions over truncated polynomial rings and Falcon's collision-resistant hashing to ensure mutual authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. Comparative analysis with prior works demonstrates a 40% reduction in communication overhead and 35% faster encryption/decryption cycles, validated through simulations on underwater acoustic modems. This work establishes a robust framework for securing UWC systems against both classical and quantum threats.
Underwater communication (UWC) systems are critical for maritime exploration, environmental monitoring, and defense, yet their security remains vulnerable to quantum computing threats. Recent studies estimate that 65% of underwater infrastructure relies on classical cryptographic protocols, which could be compromised by quantum algorithms within the next decade. Existing solutions, such as ECC-based authentication and lightweight symmetric cryptography, lack scalability, quantum resistance, or resilience against adversarial attacks in highlatency underwater environments. To address this gap, this study proposes a Post-Quantum Authentication Protocol integrating NTRU lattice-based encryption and the Falcon hash function, designed to resist quantum attacks while operating efficiently in resource-constrained UWC networks. The proposed protocol leverages NTRU's hardness assumptions over truncated polynomial rings and Falcon's collision-resistant hashing to ensure mutual authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. Comparative analysis with prior works demonstrates a 40% reduction in communication overhead and 35% faster encryption/decryption cycles, validated through simulations on underwater acoustic modems. This work establishes a robust framework for securing UWC systems against both classical and quantum threats.
The emergence of quantum computing is expected to break many conventional cryptographic algorithms currently used for authentication and secure communication. Existing security mechanisms in Next Generation Networks (NGNs), including 5G, IoT, smart healthcare, and cloud-based systems, are increasingly vulnerable to future quantum attacks. This research presents a lightweight and efficient Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) based authentication framework specifically designed for next generation network environments. The proposed framework combines quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques with optimized authentication procedures to provide secure identity verification, confidential communication, and attack resistance with minimal computational complexity. The model emphasizes reduced overhead, faster authentication response, and scalability for resource-constrained devices. Security analysis shows that the framework can effectively defend against replay attacks, impersonation attacks, session hijacking, and quantum-based cryptanalytic threats. Experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed approach achieves improved security performance while maintaining low latency and reduced resource consumption, making it suitable for practical deployment in future intelligent communication networks.
The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has introduced significant security challenges due to resource-constrained devices, heterogeneous network architectures, and largescale connectivity. Traditional authentication and key exchange mechanisms, primarily based on classical cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and ECC, are vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks. The emergence of quantum algorithms, particularly Shor’s algorithm, threatens the long-term confidentiality and integrity of IoT communications. This paper proposes a Quantum-Resistant Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol specifically designed for secure IoT architectures. The proposed framework integrates post-quantum cryptographic primitives, including lattice-based key exchange mechanisms and hash-based authentication schemes, optimized for low computational overhead suitable for constrained IoT devices. The protocol ensures mutual authentication, forward secrecy, and resistance against quantum adversaries while maintaining minimal communication latency. Security analysis demonstrates robustness against replay, man-in-the-middle, and key-compromise attacks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed solution achieves a balance between quantum security strength and resource efficiency, making it suitable for next-generation IoT deployments in smart cities, healthcare systems, and industrial automation.
ABSTRACT Quantum computing poses a looming threat to the cryptographic primitives that secure today's satellite communications. In response, post‐quantum cryptography (PQC) has emerged to protect data against future quantum‐enabled adversaries. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of lattice‐based PQC methods for secure satellite communication in the post‐quantum era. We examine the performance and security of leading lattice‐based schemes—including encryption/key‐establishment algorithms like CRYSTALS‐Kyber and NTRU, and digital signature schemes like CRYSTALS‐Dilithium and FALCON—in the context of satellite systems. Real‐world benchmark data from peer‐reviewed sources are used to evaluate computational efficiency, bandwidth overhead, memory footprint, and energy consumption of these schemes on resource‐constrained satellite hardware. We compare lattice‐based approaches with classical RSA/ECC and alternative post‐quantum techniques (hash‐based signatures, code‐based encryption), highlighting the favorable trade‐offs that have led to lattice‐based algorithms becoming primary candidates for standardization. Security analysis is presented to explain the hardness assumptions (e.g., Learning With Errors and NTRU problems) that underpin lattice cryptography, and to assess known cryptanalytic results, resistance to quantum attacks, and remaining security margins. We also discuss practical considerations for deploying lattice‐based cryptography on satellites, including integration into existing communication protocols, potential need for hardware acceleration, and strategies for cryptographic agility in long‐lived space assets. The results show that lattice‐based PQC can be feasibly implemented in satellites with acceptable performance impact, providing strong security against quantum threats and a viable path to future‐proof the confidentiality and authenticity of satellite communications.
The rapid advancement of quantum computing presents a fundamental challenge to modern cryptographic security, particularly in the domain of hash functions that ensure data integrity, authentication, and blockchain security. Traditional crypto graphic hash functions such as SHA-256, SHA-3, and BLAKE2 rely on computational hardness assumptions that become obsolete in the presence of large-scale quantum computers. Shor’s algorithm can efficiently break RSA and ECC-based cryptosys tems, while Grover’s algorithm reduces the security of traditional hash functions by square root complexity, significantly weakening their preimage and collision resistance. This quantum threat necessitates the development of post-quantum secure hashing techniques that remain resilient against both classical and quantum adversaries. This paper proposes Quantum Hashing, a novel cryptographic framework that integrates quantum entanglement, lattice-based cryptography, and hybrid quantum classical hashing to construct post-quantum secure hash functions. We introduce a formal model for Quantum Collision Resistance (QCR) and provide entropy-based ran domness enhancement to ensure unpredictable hash outputs. Unlike classical hashing approaches, our framework leverages the hardness of lattice problems (e.g., Shortest Vector Problem, Learning with Errors) to withstand quantum attacks while incorpo rating Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) mechanisms to enhance entropy and key management. Furthermore, we evaluate the security of Quantum Hashing under various attack models, comparing its resistance against Grover’s search and collision attacks. We benchmark its performance against NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) final ists, including CRYSTALS-DILITHIUM, SPHINCS+, and Falcon, demonstrating that our approach offers superior resilience while maintaining computational feasibility. Additionally, we present an implementation of Quantum Hashing using Qiskit, show casing its practical applicability in quantum circuits and quantum-secure blockchain architectures. Our findings highlight that Quantum Hashing provides a scalable, entropy-efficient, and post-quantum resilient cryptographic primitive suitable for next-generation cryptographic applications. This work paves the way for secure post-quantum digital signatures, blockchain consensus mechanisms, and zero-knowledge proof systems that require tamper-resistant hashing in a quantum computing era.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are pervasively employed in critical domains such as smart healthcare, industrial automation, and environmental surveillance, where secure access control is essential. User authentication protocols are vital for thwarting unauthorized intrusions, yet the vast majority of existing schemes rely on conventional public-key cryptography (such as ECC, RSA), which is provably insecure in the post-quantum era due to Shor's algorithm. This motivates the design of post-quantum authentication that is also lightweight for resource-limited sensors. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient authentication and key agreement protocol based on Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU), a lattice-based cryptosystem offering proven resistance to quantum attacks. We have proven the correctness and security of our scheme through BAN logic and random oracle model and demonstrated through informal analysis that our scheme can resist various attack methods and possesses high security features. Moreover, we thoroughly evaluate our protocol against the most recent state-of-the-art schemes. The results indicate that our scheme has the lowest computational cost, and its communication cost is superior to that of most other schemes. Overall, our proposed protocol provides a robust, efficient, and future-proof authentication solution for WSNs, well-suited for deploying WSNs environments.
As a non-contact identification technology, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is widely used in various Internet of Things applications. However, RFID systems are highly vulnerable to diverse attacks due to the openness of communication links between readers and tags, leading to serious security and privacy concerns. Numerous RFID authentication protocols have been designed that employ hash functions and symmetric cryptography to secure communications. Despite these efforts, such schemes generally exhibit limitations in key management flexibility and scalability, which significantly restricts their applicability in large-scale RFID deployments. Confronted with this challenge, public key cryptography offers an effective solution. Taking into account factors such as parameter size, computational complexity, and resistance to quantum attacks, the NTRU algorithm emerges as one of the most promising choices. Since the NTRU signature algorithm is highly complex and requires large parameters, there are currently only a few NTRU encryption-based RFID authentication protocols available, all of which exhibit significant security flaws-such as supporting only one-way authentication, failing to address public key distribution, and so on. Moreover, performance evaluations of the algorithm in these contexts are often incomplete. This paper proposes a mutual authentication protocol for RFID based on the NTRU encryption algorithm to address security and privacy issues. The security of the protocol is analyzed using the BAN-logic tools and some non-formalized methods, and it is further validated through simulation with the AVISPA tool. With the parameter set (N, p, q) = (443, 3, 2048), the NTRU algorithm can provide 128 bits of post-quantum security strength. This configuration not only demonstrates greater foresight at the theoretical security level but also offers significant advantages in practical energy consumption and computation time when compared to traditional algorithms such as ECC, making it a highly competitive candidate in the field of post-quantum cryptography.