Post Quantum Security and Quantum Safe Protocols: A Survey
Md. Min-ha-zul Abedin
Large-scale quantum computers would invalidate the hardness assumptions behind many deployed public key cryptosystems and reduce the effective strength of symmetric primitives. As a result, governments and industry have begun a multi-year transition toward post quantum cryptography and quantum safe protocols. This survey provides a structured overview of that transition. It classifies the main families of post quantum schemes, with emphasis on the standardized lattice based and hash-based algorithms ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA, FALCON and Classic McEliece, and it summarizes their parameter sets, key sizes, ciphertext or signature lengths and performance profiles across the NIST security categories. The survey then reviews stateful hash-based signatures, multivariate and isogeny-based proposals and emerging MPC in the head constructions and discusses their security assumptions and level of maturity. At the protocol level it analyzes hybrid designs for TLS 1.3, QUIC, IPsec, SSH and public key infrastructures and draws lessons from early deployments in web, IoT, and cloud environments. By collating detailed parameter data from recent NIST standards and reference implementations and mapping them to concrete deployment scenarios, the survey links high-level policy guidance to engineering choices. The paper also synthesizes cross cutting implementation and migration challenges, including side channel resistance, cryptographic agility, asset inventory and migration planning, and algorithm diversity across deployments. Finally, it identifies open problems such as leakage resilient implementations, domain specific post quantum profiles for constrained devices and combinations of post quantum cryptography with quantum key distribution. The goal is to give researchers and practitioners a coherent reference that connects algorithms, standards, protocol mechanisms and deployment guidance for building quantum safe systems.
•Jan 27, 2026•0 citations