Lightweight Hybrid Post-Quantum Communication VPN Architecture for Building-Wide IoT Systems
Hao Liu, Zhifu Zhang, Morgana Mo Zhou +1 more
Building-Wide Virtual Private Network (VPN) systems leverage the current communication infrastructure to connect various IoT devices and management systems through encrypted tunnels. These systems are essential for protecting sensitive data and ensuring operational security but face imminent threats from quantum computers capable of breaking widely-used public key cryptography. In this paper, we propose a lightweight hybrid post-quantum security framework specifically designed for building-wide IoT VPN systems, which combines classical cryptographic primitives (e.g., ECDH) with selected post-quantum crypto (PQC) algorithms (e.g., Kyber, Dilithium). This dual-layer architecture ensures protection against both current and future quantum threats, relying on the hardness of at least one underlying cryptographic assumption for security. Furthermore, the framework incorporates lightweight design principles tailored for resource-constrained IoT environments. These principles emphasize minimal computational demands, reduced communication costs, and limited protocol complexity. Specifically, its lightweight nature reflects simplification to the VPN protocol’s operations and the selected integration of post-quantum algorithms. This optimized application of PQC simplifies the cryptographic workload for key exchange and signature, thereby balancing security guarantees with feasible deployment on IoT hardware. Our analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves quantum resistance with manageable performance impact compared to traditional VPNs, making it a practical and scalable solution for migrating existing building management infrastructures towards post-quantum security across diverse IoT devices.
IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN)•Jul 12, 2025•1 citation