The rapid proliferation of IoT technology has brought billions of devices into play that need to operate in a variety of diverse, resource-constrained environments. Secure authentication among these devices is a critical challenge, as traditional certificate-based public key infrastructures incur heavy computation and management overhead. Moreover, recent breakthroughs in quantum computing put at risk the security of classical cryptographic algorithms commonly used in IoT systems. This paper proposes a post-quantum certificateless authentication framework designed to address the efficiency-long-term security requirements of IoT environments. The proposed framework uses lattice-based cryptography to resist quantum-enabled adversaries while eliminating the need for digital certificates. The certificateless approach evades the problem of key escrow of identity-based cryptography and simplifies the key management process. A lightweight authentication protocol, which is suitable for constrained IoT devices, is developed. Security analyses prove that our proposed framework resists common attacks such as impersonation, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The performance evaluation shows that our proposed framework reduces the communication and computational overheads compared with the traditional certificatebased authentication schemes. In this way, it is appropriate for large-scale and futureproof deployments of IoT systems.
The rapid proliferation of IoT technology has brought billions of devices into play that need to operate in a variety of diverse, resource-constrained environments. Secure authentication among these devices is a critical challenge, as traditional certificate-based public key infrastructures incur heavy computation and management overhead. Moreover, recent breakthroughs in quantum computing put at risk the security of classical cryptographic algorithms commonly used in IoT systems. This paper proposes a post-quantum certificateless authentication framework designed to address the efficiency-long-term security requirements of IoT environments. The proposed framework uses lattice-based cryptography to resist quantum-enabled adversaries while eliminating the need for digital certificates. The certificateless approach evades the problem of key escrow of identity-based cryptography and simplifies the key management process. A lightweight authentication protocol, which is suitable for constrained IoT devices, is developed. Security analyses prove that our proposed framework resists common attacks such as impersonation, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The performance evaluation shows that our proposed framework reduces the communication and computational overheads compared with the traditional certificatebased authentication schemes. In this way, it is appropriate for large-scale and futureproof deployments of IoT systems.
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most representative application scenarios in the 5G and 6G era. The concurrent access of massive IoT devices definitely poses enormous communication, computation, and certificate management challenges to the wireless authentication. Moreover, the emergence of quantum computing makes classical cryptography-based authentication protocols, such as 5G-AKA, more easier to be broken. Facing the challenges posed by the massive concurrent authentication and quantum attacks, this paper proposes a lattice cryptography based group authentication scheme, where lattice-based aggregate signature algorithm and identity-based encryption (IBE) are leveraged to achieve simultaneous authentication of concurrent accessed devices. The proposed authentication scheme eliminates the process of public key certificate management, greatly reducing the storage overhead of core network. Moreover, the utilization of lattice cryptography enables the resistance of quantum attacks. The proposed solution does not rely on additional security assumptions such as security channel or trusted group center, making it more flexible to be deployed in actual network scenario. Finally, formal security analysis of the proposed protocol is provided with the tool ProVerif. It is demonstrated that the proposed protocol can satisfy the goals of identity privacy, authentication, data confidentiality and forward secrecy. In addition, compared with existing advanced solutions, the outperformance of the proposed scheme in terms of computation overhead, signaling overhead, communication overhead, and security properties is validated with simulations.
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.
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.
The Edge-enabled Industrial Internet of Things (Edge-IIoT) has emerged as a fundamental architecture for intelligent manufacturing by enabling low-latency data collection, processing, and communication among distributed industrial devices. However, the open and distributed nature of Edge-IIoT introduces significant challenges to secure data authentication and privacy preservation. Meanwhile, conventional public key infrastructure incurs considerable certificate management overhead and is not well suited for future industrial environments in the presence of quantum computing. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lattice-based certificateless blind signature scheme for secure and privacy-preserving authentication in Edge-IIoT. The proposed scheme integrates the Dilithium signature algorithm with certificateless public key cryptography and blind signature techniques to simultaneously provide anonymous authentication, data integrity, conditional identity revocation, and post-quantum security while eliminating the certificate management overhead associated with traditional public key infrastructures. Furthermore, the proposed construction improves existing lattice-based certificateless blind signature schemes by addressing identified security weaknesses and strengthening resistance against forgery attacks, while effectively avoiding the key escrow problem inherent in identity-based cryptography. The correctness, blindness, and unforgeability of the proposed scheme are formally proved in the random oracle model based on the hardness of the Module Short Integer Solution (MSIS) problem. In addition, theoretical performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme incurs acceptable computational, communication, and storage overhead while providing comprehensive security properties, including certificateless operation, identity anonymity, no key escrow, conditional revocation, and post-quantum security. Overall, the proposed scheme achieves an effective balance between security, privacy preservation, and efficiency, which exhibits favorable theoretical security-efficiency trade-offs for secure industrial data authentication in resource-constrained Edge-IIoT environments. Practical implementation is left for future investigation.
Proxy re-signature enables transitive authentication of digital identities across different domains and has significant application value in areas such as digital rights management, cross-domain certificate validation, and distributed system access control. However, most existing proxy re-signature schemes, which are predominantly based on traditional public-key cryptosystems, face security vulnerabilities and certificate management bottlenecks. While identity-based schemes alleviate some issues, they introduce key escrow concerns. Certificateless schemes effectively resolve both certificate management and key escrow problems but remain vulnerable to quantum computing threats. To address these limitations, this paper constructs an efficient post-quantum certificateless proxy re-signature scheme based on algebraic lattices. Building upon algebraic lattice theory and leveraging the Dilithium algorithm, our scheme innovatively employs a lattice basis reduction-assisted parameter selection strategy to mitigate the potential algebraic attack vectors inherent in the NTRU lattice structure. This ensures the security and integrity of multi-party communication in quantum-threat environments. Furthermore, the scheme significantly reduces computational overhead and optimizes signature storage complexity through structured compression techniques, facilitating deployment on resource-constrained devices like Internet of Things (IoT) terminals. We formally prove the unforgeability of the scheme under the adaptive chosen-message attack model, with its security reducible to the hardness of the corresponding underlying lattice problems.
The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an unprecedented scale of data exchange across heterogeneous and resource-constrained devices. Ensuring confidentiality and secure key management in such environments is challenging. Traditional public-key infrastructures require heavy certificate-handling overhead. Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) offers a lightweight alternative by deriving public keys directly from device identities, making it attractive for IoT deployments. However, IoT devices are highly vulnerable to side-channel and key-extraction attacks, motivating the need for Forward-Secure IBE(FS-IBE), where the compromise of a current secret key does not threaten past communications. Existing FS-IBE constructions based on classical hardness assumptions are not secure in the era of post-quantum, while the lattice-based (LWE-based) forward-secure scheme suffer from large key and ciphertext sizes, limiting their suitability for constrained IoT systems. Here, we propose a new lattice-based fs-IBE scheme in the ring setting, relying on the RLWE assumption to achieve post-quantum security and significant efficiency gains. Our design uses trapdoor delegation with a minimal-cover mechanism over a binary tree. It results in compact public parameters and efficient per-epoch key updates. Compared to prior LWE-based constructions, our scheme reduces public key, secret key, and ciphertext sizes, and thus, making it better suited for practical IoT environments.