In recent years, the rapid growth of wireless technologies and the widespread use of mobile devices have drawn people toward diverse web applications. Today, users can conveniently access a variety of online services anytime and anywhere through their mobile devices. With wireless communication becoming the dominant medium, security has emerged as a major challenge, since networks are widely exposed. To address this, numerous authentication protocols have been proposed. However, most existing protocols rely on integer factorization or discrete logarithm problems, which are vulnerable to polynomial-time quantum algorithms. This makes them unsuitable for a post-quantum era. To ensure secure wireless communications for mobile devices, there is a critical need for authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols that withstand quantum attacks. In this work, we propose a two-party AKA protocol for mobile devices built upon the ring learning with errors (RLWE) problem, whose security is grounded in hard lattice assumptions. We analyze the security of our protocol using formal and informal security methods and assess its performance through comparative evaluation of computational and communication costs against related schemes. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed protocol achieves the necessary security requirements while providing efficient and reliable communication.
In recent years, the rapid growth of wireless technologies and the widespread use of mobile devices have drawn people toward diverse web applications. Today, users can conveniently access a variety of online services anytime and anywhere through their mobile devices. With wireless communication becoming the dominant medium, security has emerged as a major challenge, since networks are widely exposed. To address this, numerous authentication protocols have been proposed. However, most existing protocols rely on integer factorization or discrete logarithm problems, which are vulnerable to polynomial-time quantum algorithms. This makes them unsuitable for a post-quantum era. To ensure secure wireless communications for mobile devices, there is a critical need for authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocols that withstand quantum attacks. In this work, we propose a two-party AKA protocol for mobile devices built upon the ring learning with errors (RLWE) problem, whose security is grounded in hard lattice assumptions. We analyze the security of our protocol using formal and informal security methods and assess its performance through comparative evaluation of computational and communication costs against related schemes. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed protocol achieves the necessary security requirements while providing efficient and reliable communication.
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 Quantum computing poses a mounting and concrete threat to the cryptographi protocols underpinning mobile communication systems, where both security and computational efficiency are critical constraints. Existing three‐party authenticated key agreement (3PAKA) schemes either rely on classically hard problems broken by Shor's algorithm or, among postquantum proposals, fail to simultaneously achieve user anonymity, unlinkability, and perfect forward secrecy at acceptable cost for resource‐constrained mobile devices. We first conduct a rigorous cryptanalysis of the recent lattice‐based scheme of Singh et al. and uncover four concrete vulnerabilities: an identity recovery vulnerability and scalability failure arising from XOR masking with a static server key, which forces an exhaustive identity search and opens a denial‐of‐service vector; blind acceptance by the responder , as User forwards the initiator's message without verifying the sender's identity; authentication blindness at the initiator , since the response received by User carries no cryptographic proof of User 's identity; and server‐side incomplete verification caused by a missing session parameter , which the server requires but never receives. To remedy these deficiencies, we propose a Three‐Party Post‐Quantum Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement (MAKA) scheme for mobile devices, built on the Ideal‐Lattice Ring Learning With Errors (Ring‐LWE) assumption with parameters and Gaussian width . The proposed four‐message protocol employs biometric‐bound fuzzy extractors, dynamic masked identities , and fresh per‐session Ring‐LWE samples to achieve mutual authentication, user anonymity, unlinkability, and perfect forward secrecy. Security is formally analyzed in the Bellare–Rogaway (BR) model under the Random Oracle Model (ROM), yielding a tight reduction to the Decision‐RLWE assumption. Our message structure yields a total communication cost of bits, representing approximately improvement over Singh et al. It also demonstrates a favourable communicationcost relative to those of Islam and Basu, Rewal et al., Kumar et al., Dabra et al., and Park et al. across both metrics.
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.
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.
The Ring Learning with Errors (RLWE) problem has emerged as a foundational hardness assumption for post-quantum authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols. In this paper, we propose a post-quantum and efficient RLWE-Based AKE protocol for mobile devices. We provide formal security reduction in the random oracle model under the decisional RLWE and PRF assumptions. We also show that our scheme is safe against key mismatch attack, signal leakage attack, and provide informal analysis of all standard AKE security properties. Further, we showcase that our scheme also provides perfect forward secrecy and replay attack resistance. Finally, we compare our scheme with several other existing schemes in terms of various security attributes along with computational efficiency to demonstrate its practicality and advantages over the other schemes.
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.