ABSTRACT The rapid advancement of quantum computers poses a significant threat to classical cryptographic techniques used to distributed and multi‐server environments. This paper focuses on development of quantum‐resistant framework for authenticated multi‐server networking, designed to ensure confidentiality and integrity in the presence of quantum‐capable adversaries. We have developed a practical three‐party authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for multi‐server environments, leveraging the Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) problem for robust post‐quantum security. After finding weaknesses in Pursharthi and Mishra's work, such as inadequate session key verification and insider attack vulnerabilities, we designed our protocol to address real‐world threats like stolen devices, rogue central authorities, and replay attacks. It features an efficient preparation phase, a secure registration process, and a reliable mutual authentication mechanism, guarding against quantum, side‐channel, and replay attacks. Our detailed security analysis and performance tests confirm its resilience and efficiency, making it a scalable solution for applications like healthcare and IoT (Internet of Things). This protocol provides a structured framework for achieving secure and quantum‐resistant communication.
ABSTRACT The rapid advancement of quantum computers poses a significant threat to classical cryptographic techniques used to distributed and multi‐server environments. This paper focuses on development of quantum‐resistant framework for authenticated multi‐server networking, designed to ensure confidentiality and integrity in the presence of quantum‐capable adversaries. We have developed a practical three‐party authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for multi‐server environments, leveraging the Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) problem for robust post‐quantum security. After finding weaknesses in Pursharthi and Mishra's work, such as inadequate session key verification and insider attack vulnerabilities, we designed our protocol to address real‐world threats like stolen devices, rogue central authorities, and replay attacks. It features an efficient preparation phase, a secure registration process, and a reliable mutual authentication mechanism, guarding against quantum, side‐channel, and replay attacks. Our detailed security analysis and performance tests confirm its resilience and efficiency, making it a scalable solution for applications like healthcare and IoT (Internet of Things). This protocol provides a structured framework for achieving secure and quantum‐resistant communication.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) integrates control systems with IoT technology to enable automation and intelligent operations in industrial environments. As IIoT deployments expand, reliance on wireless communication channels increases the attack surface and exposes systems to various security and privacy threats. Moreover, the limited computational capabilities of IIoT devices and the need to preserve device anonymity introduce additional security requirements. Insufficient protection against these challenges can result in operational disruption and significant economic losses. Existing symmetric-key and hash-based schemes are lightweight but lack scalability for large IIoT deployments, whereas public-key methods provide stronger security. However, the emergence of quantum computing threatens the long-term security of such protocols, as quantum algorithms can efficiently break conventional number-theoretic cryptosystems. To address these challenges, we propose a quantum-resistant three-party authentication and key agreement (AKA) protocol for the IIoT. The ring learning with errors (RLWE)-based protocol provides quantum-safe and efficient mutual authentication and secure session key establishment between workers and devices. Comprehensive security and performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed protocol is robust against security attacks. Performance evaluations confirm lower computational and communication overhead than existing post-quantum schemes, proving its practicality for IIoT.
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.
Objective: To design a secure and efficient three-party post-quantum authenticated key agreement (AKE) protocol that ensures mutual authentication, user anonymity, and forward secrecy, while resisting both classical and quantum adversaries. Methods: The proposed protocol is constructed using the Ring Learning with Errors (Ring-LWE) assumption, which is widely regarded as quantum-resistant. The scheme enables two users to establish a shared session key through a trusted server over an insecure channel. Cryptographic hash functions, lattice-based operations, and masking techniques are employed to achieve authentication, anonymity, and key confidentiality. Formal correctness proofs, informal security analysis, and comparative performance evaluations are conducted to validate the protocol. Findings: The study describes qualitative benefits like "outperforms current protocols" but lacks specific metrics, such as exact computation costs (e.g., 4913 ns total execution) or communication rounds, and "reduces user-side cost to 2438 ns vs. 5395 ns in Islam et al.". Also, substantially more efficient than pairing- or chaotic-map-based protocols, which incur costs exceeding 12000 ns. Communication overhead is reduced by limiting the exchange to two RLWE-based messages and one server response, avoiding expensive bilinear pairing or biometric hash transmissions. These results demonstrate that the proposed scheme provides stronger security guarantees at a lower computational and communication cost, making it suitable for resource-constrained mobile and IoT environments. Novelty: Unlike existing approaches, the proposed protocol simultaneously guarantees user anonymity, forward secrecy, and quantum resistance in a three-party setting based on Ring-LWE. It overcomes known vulnerabilities in prior schemes and achieves improved efficiency without compromising security, making it a practical and robust solution for post-quantum secure communications. Keywords: Key Establishment, Authentication, Ring Learning with Errors, Anonymous Key Exchange, Post Quantum Forward Secrecy
ABSTRACT A three‐party post‐quantum key agreement protocol involves server with two communicating parties securely agreeing on a shared secret key in a way that is resistant to quantum attacks. Once the shared secret key is shared using authenticated key agreement protocol, then user (A), and user (B) can use it for securing communication channel using symmetric‐key encryption AES‐256 algorithm. Although there are few third‐party post‐quantum authenticated and key agreement schemes exist, but the recent studies in this paper illustrates that they are not satisfying properties like unlinkability, anonymity, perfect forward secrecy, and signal leakage attacks. Therefore, the proposed protocol ensures anonymity, unlinkablity, perfect forward secrecy, and resistant against signal leakage attacks. The proposed protocol uses different random numbers for each of sessions and ensures freshness of the session key to maintain forward secrecy. In this protocol, the user (A) only communicates with server, and establish an authenticated session key with user (B) which avoids server overheads. The use of ring learning with errors (RLWE) instead of the simpler learning with errors (LWE) is primarily motivated by the need for efficiency, compactness, and scalability in cryptographic applications. A comparative study, including both performance and security assessments, demonstrates that the proposed design is more secure and efficient.
A three-party authenticated key exchange protocol enables two entities to agree on a session key with the help of a dedicated server over public channel. Shor’s algorithm is a big threat for existing authenticated key exchange protocols. Lattice based cryptography plays a very important role in designing authentication and key agreement secure against the threat of quantum attacks. However, it is not easy job to design quantum resistant password based three party protocol due to the high demand for security requirements and the limited resources nature of mobile devices. In this article, we have proposed a new post quantum three party key exchange based on ring learning with errors assumption. This protocol is motivated from Islam et al.’s authenticated key exchange protocol. Their protocol is not secure against stolen smartcard attack, password guessing attack, and can’t provide user anonymity. The anonymous communication is a big requirement for practical applications like e-healthcare services/smart vehicular communication. This paper also contains the performance analysis of the proposed protocol along with other relevant protocols.
The emergence of quantum computing is expected to break many conventional cryptographic algorithms currently used for authentication and secure communication. Existing security mechanisms in Next Generation Networks (NGNs), including 5G, IoT, smart healthcare, and cloud-based systems, are increasingly vulnerable to future quantum attacks. This research presents a lightweight and efficient Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) based authentication framework specifically designed for next generation network environments. The proposed framework combines quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques with optimized authentication procedures to provide secure identity verification, confidential communication, and attack resistance with minimal computational complexity. The model emphasizes reduced overhead, faster authentication response, and scalability for resource-constrained devices. Security analysis shows that the framework can effectively defend against replay attacks, impersonation attacks, session hijacking, and quantum-based cryptanalytic threats. Experimental evaluation indicates that the proposed approach achieves improved security performance while maintaining low latency and reduced resource consumption, making it suitable for practical deployment in future intelligent communication networks.