Device-to-device (D2D) communication is expected to become a key component of 6G and IoT systems, enabling low-latency and infrastructure-independent connectivity. A major challenge is to establish secure session keys between previously unknown devices without relying on an online trusted third party, while also ensuring resilience against future quantum adversaries. This paper proposes a lightweight hybrid authentication and key agreement protocol for decentralized D2D communication. The approach combines IPFS-assisted distributed key discovery with a two-message protocol that uses post-quantum key encapsulation for long-term confidentiality, while retaining elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for efficient real-time authentication under classical security assumptions.This design reflects the different temporal security requirements of confidentiality and authentication and provides a practical trade-off between quantum resilience and computational efficiency. The proposed scheme achieves mutual authentication under classical ECC assumptions, secure session key establishment, and resistance against common attacks, while providing post-quantum confidentiality protection against future quantum adversaries and removing the need for an online trusted third party (TTP) during protocol execution. The results demonstrate that the protocol offers a competitive and practical solution for secure decentralized D2D communication in IoT and future 6G environments.
Device-to-device (D2D) communication is expected to become a key component of 6G and IoT systems, enabling low-latency and infrastructure-independent connectivity. A major challenge is to establish secure session keys between previously unknown devices without relying on an online trusted third party, while also ensuring resilience against future quantum adversaries. This paper proposes a lightweight hybrid authentication and key agreement protocol for decentralized D2D communication. The approach combines IPFS-assisted distributed key discovery with a two-message protocol that uses post-quantum key encapsulation for long-term confidentiality, while retaining elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for efficient real-time authentication under classical security assumptions.This design reflects the different temporal security requirements of confidentiality and authentication and provides a practical trade-off between quantum resilience and computational efficiency. The proposed scheme achieves mutual authentication under classical ECC assumptions, secure session key establishment, and resistance against common attacks, while providing post-quantum confidentiality protection against future quantum adversaries and removing the need for an online trusted third party (TTP) during protocol execution. The results demonstrate that the protocol offers a competitive and practical solution for secure decentralized D2D communication in IoT and future 6G environments.
The imminent advent of quantum computing threatens the long-term security of classical public-key cryptography, creating critical challenges for resource-constrained internet of things (IoT) environments.Hybrid cryptographic frameworks combining elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) primitives have emerged as a transitional solution; however, their security properties remain insufficiently validated under semi-trusted infrastructure assumptions.This paper presents a comprehensive security evaluation of a hybrid ECC-KEM authentication and key agreement framework targeting IoT deployments.Using a dual-verification methodology that integrates formal symbolic analysis with the Tamarin-Prover and practical AI-assisted testing via the APSVer tool, we identify a critical impersonation vulnerability that enables a semi-trusted third party (TTP) to reconstruct PUF-based authentication material.To mitigate this flaw, we introduce a protocol enhancement incorporating ML-DSA post-quantum digital signatures and device-isolated key derivation.Formal verification confirms that the enhanced protocol achieves mutual authentication, session key secrecy, replay resistance, and effective isolation of the TTP.Experimental performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed security improvements introduce only a 12%-15% computational overhead, preserving feasibility for constrained IoT devices.The proposed framework provides a practical, quantum-resilient authentication architecture suitable for next-generation secure IoT deployments.
The evolution of 6G networks necessitates robust authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocols to counter emerging security challenges, particularly the threat posed by quantum computing. Existing 5G-AKA protocols remain vulnerable to user tracking, replay attacks, and false base station impersonation, while Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and RSA-based key exchanges face imminent obsolescence due to quantum attacks. This study examines the vulnerabilities of 5G-AKA and explores hybrid post-quantum cryptography (PQC) as a transitional security solution for 6G networks. We evaluate NIST-standardized PQC algorithms, focusing on their computational overhead, key size efficiency, and adaptability to heterogeneous network environments, including IoT and ultra-low latency applications. A comparative analysis of hybrid cryptographic schemes demonstrates that lattice-based (Kyber, Dilithium), hash-based (SPHINCS+), and code-based (BIKE, Classic McEliece) PQC techniques provide varying trade-offs between security, efficiency, and deployment feasibility. Furthermore, we propose a quantum-resistant 6G-AKA framework, integrating hybrid PQC, AI-driven trust mechanisms, and decentralized authentication to ensure scalability and interoperability. Experimental benchmarks highlight potential performance constraints, including latency in PQC-based key exchange and resource limitations in edge computing. Addressing these challenges requires the optimization of lightweight PQC implementations, formal security validation, and global standardization efforts. Our findings provide a roadmap for the secure transition to 6G authentication protocols, ensuring resilience against both classical and quantum threats.
The rapid proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has connected billions of devices that continuously exchange sensitive data over public wireless channels, making secure authentication a critical requirement. However, most IoT end devices are severely resource-constrained, which renders conventional public-key infrastructures based on RSA, bilinear pairings, or digital certificates impractical. Although many authentication and key agreement schemes have been proposed, recent cryptanalytic studies show that they often either omit essential security properties such as perfect forward secrecy or resistance to ephemeral secret leakage or incur overhead that is unacceptable for low-power nodes. To address this gap, this paper proposes a lightweight Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based authentication and key agreement protocol for a three-tier IoT architecture consisting of a user, a semi-trusted gateway server, and an IoT sensor. The protocol relies solely on elliptic-curve scalar multiplication, one-way hash functions, and bitwise XOR operations, avoiding bilinear pairings and certificate management. It achieves mutual authentication among all three parties through timestamped, hash-based authenticators and establishes a contributory session-key derived from fresh ephemeral keys, ensuring perfect forward secrecy. The security of the protocol is established through a detailed informal analysis, demonstrating resistance to major attacks, and is formally verified using the AVISPA tool, where both the OFMC and CL-AtSe back-ends report the protocol as SAFE under the Dolev–Yao adversary model. A comparative performance evaluation against several recent ECC-based authentication schemes shows that the proposed protocol maintains low cost requirements suitable for constrained IoT devices, and resulting in a communication overhead of 1828 bits, which is competitive with most recent ECC-based schemes evaluated, and imposing a minimal storage burden on end devices. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol achieves a favorable balance between security and efficiency, making it well suited to resource-constrained IoT environments.
Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) is a developing technology in our time that is prone to security problems as it uses wireless and shared networks. A challenging scenario in IoT environments is Device-to-Device (D2D) communication that an authentication server as a trusted third-party, does not involve in the authentication and key agreement process. It is only involved in the process of allocating long-term secret keys and their update. A lot of authentication protocols have been suggested for such situations. This article demonstrated that three state-of-the-art related protocols failed to remain anonymous, insecure against key compromise impersonation (KCI) attack, and clogging attack. To counter the pitfalls of them, a new D2D mutual authentication and key agreement protocol is designed here. The proposed protocol is anonymous, untraceable, and highly secure. Moreover, there is no need for a secure channel to generate a pair of private and public keys in the registration phase.) Formal security proof and security analysis using BAN logic, Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, and Scyther tool showed that our proposed protocol satisfied security requirements. Furthermore, communication cost, computation cost, and energy consumption comparisons denoted our schema has better performance, compared to other protocols.
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 growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has connected billions of smart devices across healthcare, transportation, industrial automation, and smart home environments. While IoT has enhanced automation and data-driven decision-making, its widespread deployment has also increased the risk of cyberattacks. Conventional public-key cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are vulnerable to future quantum computing attacks, particularly those based on Shor's algorithm. This paper proposes a Quantum-Resistant Cryptographic Framework (QRCF) for secure IoT communication using lattice-based cryptography integrated with lightweight authentication and efficient key management. The framework is designed to meet the computational limitations of IoT devices while ensuring long-term confidentiality and integrity. Performance evaluation demonstrates improvements in security resilience, authentication efficiency, and communication reliability compared with traditional cryptographic approaches. The proposed framework offers a scalable and future-ready solution for protecting IoT ecosystems in the post-quantum era.