The rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) and distributed energy resources (DERs) is transforming power systems into cyber-physical environments that depend on secure, low-latency communication. Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) coordinate interactions between EVs, photovoltaic inverters, battery storage, and utility interfaces using standards such as ISO 15118, IEEE 2030.5, and IEC 61850. However, these protocols rely on classical public-key cryptography, including RSA and elliptic-curve schemes, which are vulnerable to future quantum attacks. Ensuring long-term confidentiality, integrity, and availability across EV-DER communication paths therefore requires a transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). This paper presents a reproducible PQC communication testbed tailored to HEMS-mediated EV-DER ecosystems. The framework integrates National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardised algorithms (ML-KEM and ML-DSA) into hybrid TLS 1.3 handshakes and evaluates their performance against classical baselines under realistic operating conditions. Four adversarial scenarios, man-in-the-middle (MITM), replay, downgrade, and fuzz/DoS are executed to assess resilience across critical communication links. Results show that hybrid PQC adds modest latency while maintaining the operational timing requirements needed for grid coordination. The findings demonstrate that quantum-resilient communication can be incorporated into existing EV and DER standards without compromising interoperability or performance. The testbed offers a practical foundation for PQC-enabled migration in future smart-grid environments.
The rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) and distributed energy resources (DERs) is transforming power systems into cyber-physical environments that depend on secure, low-latency communication. Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) coordinate interactions between EVs, photovoltaic inverters, battery storage, and utility interfaces using standards such as ISO 15118, IEEE 2030.5, and IEC 61850. However, these protocols rely on classical public-key cryptography, including RSA and elliptic-curve schemes, which are vulnerable to future quantum attacks. Ensuring long-term confidentiality, integrity, and availability across EV-DER communication paths therefore requires a transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). This paper presents a reproducible PQC communication testbed tailored to HEMS-mediated EV-DER ecosystems. The framework integrates National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardised algorithms (ML-KEM and ML-DSA) into hybrid TLS 1.3 handshakes and evaluates their performance against classical baselines under realistic operating conditions. Four adversarial scenarios, man-in-the-middle (MITM), replay, downgrade, and fuzz/DoS are executed to assess resilience across critical communication links. Results show that hybrid PQC adds modest latency while maintaining the operational timing requirements needed for grid coordination. The findings demonstrate that quantum-resilient communication can be incorporated into existing EV and DER standards without compromising interoperability or performance. The testbed offers a practical foundation for PQC-enabled migration in future smart-grid environments.
With the advancement of quantum computing, traditional public-key cryptographic algorithms are increasingly at risk of being broken. This paper investigates the applicability of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) within modernized power grid infrastructures, commonly known as smart grids, that rely heavily on interconnected and sometimes internet-facing devices and distributed control systems. To help safeguard these critical infrastructures against quantum-enabled threats, we benchmark and evaluate the performance of NIST-standardized and finalist PQC Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) in a realistic smart grid testbed. Our evaluation includes both benchmarking of core cryptographic operations, key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation, as well as full TLS 1.3 handshake benchmarking across a real network of embedded devices and smart grid nodes. A key contribution of this work is the development of a smart grid testbed spanning multiple buildings with distributed energy resources (DERs) such as batteries and photovoltaic arrays, enabling an in-depth, system-level evaluation of post-quantum key exchange protocols in this context. We conclude by discussing the trade-offs between algorithmic efficiency and system constraints such as bandwidth, key rotation frequency, and device capability. Our findings offer actionable recommendations for the deployment of PQC algorithms tailored to the smart grid.
Quantum computing is rapidly approaching a stage where classical cryptographic systems, particularly RSA, ECC, and Diffie–Hellman, will no longer provide adequate security for critical infrastructure. The emergence of Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms introduces unprecedented vulnerability to national cyber-defense ecosystems, underpinning power grids, transportation, military communications, and banking systems. This paper presents a unified post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) security framework integrating lattice-based primitives, hybrid key-exchange mechanisms, and secure orchestration for resource-constrained operational-technology environments. The proposed architecture leverages NIST-recommended schemes, including CRYSTALS-Kyber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium, and SPHINCS+, to ensure long-term confidentiality, integrity, and interoperability across legacy and modern control environments. A defense-in-depth trust-fabric is introduced to protect critical data flows across edge controllers, automation PLCs, substations, cloud-SCADA gateways, and defense communication systems. Performance evaluation demonstrates a 39.4% reduction in key-exchange latency, 46% faster authentication cycles, and zero-downtime cryptographic transition capability. Our findings position this framework as a practical migration blueprint supporting national PQC readiness and cyber-resilience mandates.
The transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) presents significant challenges for modern computing environments due to increased computational overhead, communication latency, and implementation complexity. Existing evaluation methods typically focus on isolated cryptographic performance metrics and do not provide a unified framework for assessing the overall resilience of PQC deployments across heterogeneous systems. This paper introduces the Quantum Encryption Resilience Score (QERS), a novel system-level evaluation framework designed to quantify the resilience of post-quantum cryptographic implementations by integrating computational, network, and operational performance metrics into a single composite score. QERS provides a standardized methodology for comparing PQC algorithms across diverse deployment scenarios. In this study, the framework is experimentally evaluated using a heterogeneous ESP32-based embedded and IoT testbed with gateway-assisted post-quantum cryptographic processing. The proposed framework is validated through experimental implementations of the NIST-standardized ML-KEM key encapsulation mechanism and the ML-DSA digital signature algorithm under multiple communication protocols and heterogeneous hardware configurations. Experimental results demonstrate that QERS effectively distinguishes the trade-offs between security, computational efficiency, resource utilization, and communication performance, providing a practical decision-support framework for selecting appropriate PQC implementations. The proposed framework contributes a reproducible and extensible methodology for the system-level evaluation of post-quantum cryptography and establishes a foundation for future research into standardized resilience and trust assessment of quantum-resistant systems.
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 rapid advancement of quantum computing poses a significant threat to classical cryptographic mechanisms, necessitating the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into security frameworks for IoT-enabled power electronics. Smart grids and industrial automation systems rely on interconnected IoT devices for real-time control, monitoring, and data exchange, making them highly vulnerable to emerging quantum threats. This book chapter explores PQC frameworks tailored for securing power electronics in smart grid and industrial applications, addressing critical challenges such as computational overhead, communication latency, system compatibility, and scalability. The impact of PQC on real-time performance was evaluated, considering its influence on industrial IoT networks, cryptographic handshake efficiency, and data transmission reliability. Hybrid cryptographic solutions that combine classical and post-quantum approaches are assessed for their feasibility in power electronics IoT systems. Security resilience under adverse network conditions, including cyberattacks and network disruptions, was also analyzed to ensure seamless PQC integration without compromising operational stability. Through a comprehensive study of PQC implementation, performance optimization, and interoperability testing, this chapter provides insights into the future of secure and resilient power electronics systems in quantum-era cybersecurity landscapes.
The incorporation of Electric Vehicles into smart grid networks poses great cybersecurity threats, especially with respect to the secure authentication of devices and communications between charging stations, electric vehicles, and grid operators. Conventional cryptography methods like RSA and ECC are susceptible to quantum computing attacks, which call for the implementation of post-quantum cryptography in order to make these systems quantum-resistant. This paper discusses need and imminence of post-quantum cryptography-based authentication mechanisms for improving the security of smart grid infrastructure that facilitates Electric Vehicles operation and charging stations. It introduces the existing authentication protocols, their shortcomings from a quantum threat perspective, and suggests a framework using quantum-resistant algorithms for authenticating devices, exchanging keys, and ensuring data integrity. Moreover, we tackle scalability, efficiency, and standardization issues regarding the deployment of PQC-based solutions in large-scale smart grid settings. This research identifies the compelling need for secure, quantum-resistant authentication systems to protect the increasing overlap of electric vehicles and smart grid networks, with a view to maintaining secure, reliable, and future-proof energy infrastructures.