Quantum cryptography represents a revolutionary paradigm shift in The rapid proliferation of smart home devices introduces significant security challenges, primarily due to their resource constraints and heterogeneous communication protocols. Cryptographic key exchange protocols play a pivotal role in establishing secure communication channels within smart home ecosystems. This article examines prominent key exchange mechanisms, evaluates their suitability for smart home environments, and proposes enhancements tailored to address the unique security threats faced by these systems. Through comparative analysis and graphical evaluation, this study provides insights into optimizing the balance between security, computational overhead, and energy efficiency. The results highlight that lightweight protocols such as Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) offer robust security with feasible performance for smart home deployments.
Quantum cryptography represents a revolutionary paradigm shift in The rapid proliferation of smart home devices introduces significant security challenges, primarily due to their resource constraints and heterogeneous communication protocols. Cryptographic key exchange protocols play a pivotal role in establishing secure communication channels within smart home ecosystems. This article examines prominent key exchange mechanisms, evaluates their suitability for smart home environments, and proposes enhancements tailored to address the unique security threats faced by these systems. Through comparative analysis and graphical evaluation, this study provides insights into optimizing the balance between security, computational overhead, and energy efficiency. The results highlight that lightweight protocols such as Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) offer robust security with feasible performance for smart home deployments.
Background: The incorporation of the Internet of Things (IoT) in intelligent home systems has significantly enhanced the ability to monitor, control, and interact with various home devices. These systems utilize a vast network of interconnected devices that collect and share data, necessitating robust security measures to protect against unauthorized access and ensure data integrity. IoT security encounters obstacles including resource-limited devices, extensive networks, heterogeneous systems, vulnerable communication channels, and insufficient inherent safeguards. Addressing them requires lightweight encryption, safe protocols, frequent updates, and strong authentication to preserve performance while assuring security. This study encrypts data using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm and evaluates three encryption techniques—single-key, multi-key, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)—to secure IoT communications within smart home environments. We evaluate these methods based on their security effectiveness, measured by entropy, and operational efficiency, as demonstrated by encryption and decryption times. The findings demonstrate that while multiple key encryptions offer a higher level of security through increased entropy, ECC provides superior efficiency by significantly reducing the encryption and decryption times compared to the other tested methods. The study highlights the importance of employing advanced encryption techniques in IoT systems to enhance security and efficiency. ECC emerges as a promising solution for its balance of robust security and operational efficiency, making it ideal for real-time smart home applications.
ABSTARCT The rapid proliferation of smart home Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has transformed residential environments through intelligent automation, remote monitoring, and data driven decision making. Alongside these benefits, security risks have intensified due to advances in large scale quantum computing, which threaten the cryptographic foundations of current IoT systems. Widely deployed public key algorithms such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography are vulnerable to quantum attacks enabled by Shor’s algorithm, raising serious concerns regarding long term confidentiality, authentication, and trust in smart home ecosystems. To address this challenge, two major quantum resilient security paradigms have emerged: Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). This paper presents a structured comparative study of PQC and QKD within smart home IoT environments, evaluating architectural compatibility, computational and energy constraints, scalability, deployment cost, communication models, and security guarantees. Realistic smart home scenarios including smart locks, surveillance cameras, and resource constrained sensor networks are examined to assess practical feasibility. The analysis demonstrates that while QKD offers information theoretic security under ideal conditions, its reliance on specialized quantum hardware and dedicated infrastructure makes it unsuitable for consumer smart homes. In contrast, PQC provides a scalable, software based, and cost effective approach that integrates seamlessly. Keywords: Post-Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Key Distribution, Smart Home IoT, Quantum Security, IoT Cryptography.
The current technological advancements in quantum computing pose a threat to traditional key exchange protocols such as Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), Diffie-Hellman (DH), and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH). One of the most important quantum algorithms is Shor's algorithm, which can easily defeat traditional approaches that rely on complex mathematical computations. Instead, the security of the key exchange protocol is provided by quantum cryptographic applications known as quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, which are based on quantum mechanical principles. QKD provides a secure substitute for key exchange. This paper examines the security of both traditional and quantum key exchange techniques. Using simulation tools such as Qiskit and NetSquid, we model QKD-based communication channels and analyze key rate performance, error rates, and scalability in comparison to classical cryptographic techniques. This paper introduces the emergence of current quantum safe encryption techniques by offering a standardized comparison of key exchange protocols and their applicability to future secure networks. The insights derived from our simulations provide valuable guidance for researchers, industry practitioners, and policymakers in determining the optimal path toward quantum-secure communication infrastructures.
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.
In smart home environments, Harvest Now and Decrypt Later (HNDL) attacks pose a significant threat to long-term privacy. Traditional elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based authentication systems can be neutralized using the Shor algorithm on quantum computers, making it difficult to mitigate these threats. In this study, we propose a hybrid authentication and key exchange protocol designed to address the resource constraints of smart home systems, while introducing the NIST standard post quantum cryptography (PQC) to defend against HNDL attacks. The proposed protocol operates through four concise steps: (1) Setup and Registration for identities and pre-shared keys (PSK); (2) Key Agreement between the user and gateway using ML-KEM; (3) Session Key Distribution from the gateway to the smart device (SD) using the PSK; and (4) Mutual Authentication to verify the established key across all nodes. Formal verification using ProVerif and Scyther confirms the security of the proposed protocol, which achieved a communication cost of 7424 bits, representing a 44–82% reduction compared to existing PQC protocols. Furthermore, the proposed protocol demonstrated an execution time of 0.3205 ms, achieving a 74–90% and 60–74% improvement over existing ECC-based and PQC-based methods, respectively. Consequently, this study presents a quantum-resistant authentication protocol for smart-home environments that achieves a practical balance between security and efficiency.
The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has revolutionized digital communication, yet it simultaneously poses unprecedented security challenges due to constrained device capabilities and increasing cyber threats. Conventional cryptographic techniques, while currently effective, are vulnerable to emerging quantum computing technologies that threaten to render classical encryption obsolete. This paper explores the integration of quantum-safe cryptographic techniques within IoT networks to ensure long-term confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. It examines post-quantum cryptographic primitives, including lattice-based, hash-based, multivariate, and code-based schemes, and evaluates their suitability for resource-constrained IoT environments. The study focuses on lightweight implementation strategies, balancing computational efficiency with robust security requirements. Simulation analyses demonstrate that properly optimized quantum safe protocols can provide resilient encryption, key exchange, and digital signature functionalities without overwhelming device resources. Furthermore, the integration of these techniques with IoT communication standards and secure network protocols ensures end-to-end protection across heterogeneous networks. Challenges such as latency, energy consumption, and scalability are addressed, highlighting the necessity of tailored cryptographic solutions for diverse IoT applications. The findings confirm that quantum safe cryptography is essential for future-proofing IoT networks, offering sustainable security measures that remain resilient against both classical and quantum adversaries, thereby supporting the continued expansion of secure and intelligent interconnected systems.