Introduction: Distributed electroencephalography (EEG) brain-computer interface (BCI) systems increasingly transmit neural data and control messages between a head-worn device, a nearby hub, and cloud-assisted services. These links require integrity, authenticity, replay protection, and low latency, while migration to post-quantum cryptography can increase session-establishment cost. Methods: We present PQ-NeuroLink, a latency-aware post-quantum-ready communication framework that separates authenticated session establishment from the symmetric streaming fast path. The design supports classical X25519, post-quantum ML-KEM-768, and hybrid ML-KEM-768 plus X25519 key establishment, with pinned ML-DSA public keys for endpoint identity binding. The prototype was evaluated using EEG-derived traffic from public datasets over BLE-like and Wi-Fi-like link profiles, 1-hop and 2-hop topologies, symmetric key-update and public-key refresh events, active tampering scenarios, and MCU-informed resource and processing-energy projections. Results: Identity pinning and transcript binding prevented successful modeled session-splicing attempts. Post-quantum and hybrid modes primarily increased handshake bytes rather than steady-state streaming latency. In the most constrained BLE 1-hop summary condition, the hybrid M3 mode increased p95 latency by 0.45 ms relative to the unsecured M0 baseline while maintaining 99.0% packet delivery. Discussion: Post-quantum-ready authenticated session establishment can be integrated into distributed EEG communication prototypes when public-key operations are kept off the per-frame path. PQ-NeuroLink provides a reproducible communication-layer basis for secure next-generation BCI deployment studies requiring low-latency operation and long-horizon post-quantum protection.
Introduction: Distributed electroencephalography (EEG) brain-computer interface (BCI) systems increasingly transmit neural data and control messages between a head-worn device, a nearby hub, and cloud-assisted services. These links require integrity, authenticity, replay protection, and low latency, while migration to post-quantum cryptography can increase session-establishment cost. Methods: We present PQ-NeuroLink, a latency-aware post-quantum-ready communication framework that separates authenticated session establishment from the symmetric streaming fast path. The design supports classical X25519, post-quantum ML-KEM-768, and hybrid ML-KEM-768 plus X25519 key establishment, with pinned ML-DSA public keys for endpoint identity binding. The prototype was evaluated using EEG-derived traffic from public datasets over BLE-like and Wi-Fi-like link profiles, 1-hop and 2-hop topologies, symmetric key-update and public-key refresh events, active tampering scenarios, and MCU-informed resource and processing-energy projections. Results: Identity pinning and transcript binding prevented successful modeled session-splicing attempts. Post-quantum and hybrid modes primarily increased handshake bytes rather than steady-state streaming latency. In the most constrained BLE 1-hop summary condition, the hybrid M3 mode increased p95 latency by 0.45 ms relative to the unsecured M0 baseline while maintaining 99.0% packet delivery. Discussion: Post-quantum-ready authenticated session establishment can be integrated into distributed EEG communication prototypes when public-key operations are kept off the per-frame path. PQ-NeuroLink provides a reproducible communication-layer basis for secure next-generation BCI deployment studies requiring low-latency operation and long-horizon post-quantum protection.
The proliferation of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and wireless Electroencephalography (EEG) devices necessitates security protocols that are simultaneously quantum-resistant and intrinsically linked to users’ biological identity. While standard post-quantum cryptography like ML-KEM provides foundational security, it fails to address critical neurotechnology requirements: integrated biometric authentication, efficient long-term session management, and resilience to signal noise. This paper presents Neural-LWE (NLWE), a novel biometric-anchored authenticated key agreement protocol for quantum-secure Brain-Computer Interfaces. We introduce five fundamental innovations: (1) integration of Kalman-filtered EEG features with ML-KEM encapsulation for biometric two-factor authentication; (2) Zero-Communication-Round Rekeying (ZCRR) enabling 250× more efficient forward secrecy updates; (3) entropy-adaptive security dynamically scaling lattice parameters based on real-time EEG quality; (4) ternary-entropy masking for side-channel resistance; and (5) manifold-based anomaly detection against presentation attacks. NLWE establishes IND-CCA2 security under the Module-LWE (MLWE) assumption while addressing unique BCI constraints through formal cryptographic-biometric binding. Implementation results using physiologically plausible synthetic data confirm that ZCRR achieves 0.45μJ rekeying energy with sub-millisecond latency. While experimental validation is performed in a controlled environment, the results indicate NLWE is a promising proof-of-concept for continuous neural applications requiring persistent quantum security.
Post-quantum authenticated key exchange is needed for Internet of Things (IoT) systems facing quantum-enabled adversaries, but signature-heavy post-quantum handshakes remain costly for constrained devices and long-delay non-terrestrial network (NTN) links. This paper proposes NTN-PQ-AKE, a lightweight, transcript-bound authenticated key exchange for managed IoT/NTN deployments. The protocol avoids online post-quantum signatures by combining the Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) with provisioned symmetric token material, replay-window checking, transcript-bound derivation using the HMAC-based Key Derivation Function (HKDF), and two-way confirmation tags. Its principal novelty relative to the KEM-based baselines considered here is the joint provision of pair-scoped pre-authentication before ML-KEM processing, complete binding of the key-establishing transcript, and fail-closed two-way key confirmation for managed IoT/NTN deployments. Its “authenticate first, compute later” design rejects forged initiations before expensive KEM processing, while each endpoint releases local session keys only after verifying the role-specific peer confirmation for the same transcript-derived state. Security analysis under a Dolev–Yao adversarial model shows that, within the stated freshness and provisioning assumptions, NTN-PQ-AKE supports mutual authentication, KEM-derived session-key freshness for uncompromised sessions, replay and man-in-the-middle resistance, transcript integrity, and scoped resource-exhaustion mitigation; it does not claim full perfect forward secrecy after later endpoint-key compromise. Across 100 measured runs after five warm-up runs, hardware profiling on an STM32F407G-DISC1 Cortex-M4 gives a mean combined Alice-and-Bob handshake cost of 3,812,967 cycles (SD 13,420; 95% CI half-width 2,662), or 22.70 ms at 168 MHz, with 52,356 B of text, 136 B of data, and 68,664 B of bss. OMNeT++ evaluation shows that NTN-PQ-AKE transmits 2,472 bytes and completes in approximately 524.67 ms on the modeled NTN channel.
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that use the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol poses significant security challenges in the emerging quantum computing era. Current Transport Layer Security (TLS) implementations rely on classical cryptographic algorithms vulnerable to Shor's algorithm. This paper proposes PQ-MQTT, a hybrid post-quantum secure communication protocol that integrates ML-KEM-768 with X25519 for key encapsulation and a lightweight session-key derivation mechanism optimized for resource-constrained IoT publishers. We present a formal security analysis under the Quantum Random Oracle Model (QROM), demonstrating resilience against store-now-decryptlater attacks. Experimental evaluation on the Raspberry Pi 4, ESP32, and Arduino Nano 33 platforms shows that PQ-MQTT achieves handshake latencies of127.3ms,412.7ms, and1,847.2ms, respectively, with 18.2 KB of additional memory overhead. A comparative analysis of pure post-quantum and classical TLS implementations shows energy reductions of23.5%−40.5%relative to pure PQC, achieved through our hybrid optimization approach, while maintaining 94.2 % throughput efficiency.
Post-quantum (PQ) cryptographic algorithms, particularly for authentication, are more complex than classical algorithms and require larger certificates, signatures, and keys. Establishing a PQ-secure network connection increases bandwidth, memory, computation time, and energy consumption. These costs are especially severe in Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs), where long propagation delays, intermittent connectivity, constrained link budgets, satellite handovers, limited terminal resources, and bandwidth-constrained satellite-to-ground links amplify the overhead of certificate-based PQ authentication. Consequently, applications such as key rotation and key management may be unable to achieve acceptable handshake reliability or support NIST PQ Security Categories above Category 1. Similar limitations affect low-power IoT devices and bandwidth- or energy-constrained terrestrial networks, where PQ authentication may restrict devices to Category 1 security or prevent ambient-powered endpoints from supporting PQ authentication altogether. This paper investigates an alternative cryptographic framework that replaces PQ digital certificates with shared secret keys (SSKs). The framework leverages shared-secret ecosystems that do not rely on asymmetric key distribution, such as 5G/6G, and combines a Key Distribution Center (KDC) (e.g., Kerberos) with a preshared-key PQ handshake (e.g., DTLS-PSK) and ephemeral PQ key establishment (e.g., ML-KEM). Compared with certificate-based PQ authentication (e.g., ML-DSA), the proposed approach reduces handshake bandwidth, endpoint RAM, computation time, and energy use while preserving PQ-secure AEAD, including forward secrecy and replay resistance. Applications include NTN-based key rotation and management, uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) command-and-control systems, embedded medical sensors, and supply-chain monitoring and asset-tracking platforms.
This paper introduces PQ-LiteKEM, a formally verified, lightweight post-quantum security protocol for energy- and resource-constrained Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. Addressing near-term quantum threats and emerging regulatory mandates such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act, the protocol mitigates the ‘harvest-now-decrypt-later’ (HNDL) quantum threat by securing sensitive physiological data over low-powered wireless channels. PQ-LiteKEM's architecture pairs lightweight symmetric-key mutual authentication, tied to dynamic hardware fingerprints, with ML-KEM-512 encapsulation and AES-256-GCM authenticated encryption. Formal verification through ProVerif and Scyther confirms security against key compromise, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks, with provable session forward secrecy, mutual authentication, and session integrity. PQ-LiteKEM is validated on an ESP32-S3-powered wearable sensor communicating with a Raspberry Pi edge gateway over a BLE testbed. Performance profiling measured a total cryptographic latency of 5.9 ms and a peak memory footprint of 9 kB, approximately 0.1% of available RAM. These results show that post-quantum cryptographic guarantees are achievable on constrained medical sensors without sacrificing runtime efficiency, and that the approach generalises beyond BLE to other wireless channels.
The emergence of quantum computing poses an existential threat to current Internet of Things security infrastructure, which relies predominantly on RSA and elliptic curve cryptography for confidentiality and authentication. Shor's algorithm enables polynomial-time factorization that can break these classical cryptographic primitives, necessitating urgent migration to quantum-resistant alternatives. This paper presents the first comprehensive performance evaluation of six NISTstandardized and candidate post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms (ML-KEM-512, ML-KEM-768, NTRU-Prime-hrss, BIKE-L1, HQC-128, Classic-McEliece-348864) integrated into the MQTT protocol across 4,608 experimental configurations spanning diverse real-world network conditions. We systematically evaluate connection establishment latency, message delivery reliability, decryption computational overhead, and throughput stability under systematically varied network latency (10-150 ms representing LAN to satellite links), packet loss rates (0-10% spanning excellent to degraded connectivity), payload sizes (128-1024 bytes covering sensor telemetry to multimedia streams), and message transmission rates (1-10 Hz from periodic monitoring to real-time control). Statistical analysis of 622,080 MQTT messages totaling 384 hours of simulation time reveals that NTRU-Prime-hrss achieves optimal performance-security balance with 98.1% delivery ratio and 26.1 ms median handshake latency across all tested conditions, while Classic-McEliece exhibits 278.3 ms handshake overhead rendering it impractical for resourceconstrained deployments despite offering conservative security margins. We demonstrate through generalized linear modeling that transport-layer effects (TCP retransmissions, TLS record framing overhead) dominate post-quantum cryptographic computational costs, accounting for approximately 70% of endto-end latency in high-loss scenarios. Our novel three-gate decision framework provides quantitative deployment criteria for IoT operators balancing security requirements against operational constraints. Complete implementation, experimental dataset, and analysis scripts available at https://github.com/ vssk18/PQSM-RESEARCH.