PQ-Lattice: A Lattice-Based Post-Quantum Authentication Protocol for Decentralized IoT Systems

Abstract

Conventional Asymmetrical RSA and ECC chord cryptosystems have the horns of a dilemma due to the advent of quantum computers. In this paper, we introduce PQ-Lattice-a decentralized lattice-based postquantum authenticated key exchange protocol for IoT. The protocol uses CRYSTALS-Kyber for key encapsulationand CRYSTALS-Dilithium for digital signatures in a blockchain empowered identity management framework providing decentralization, mutual authentication and fine grained revocation without the dependence on trusted authority. Extensive performance evaluation on an ARM Cortex-M4 device shows that PQ-Lattice has the average computation time of 32.4 ms, communication overhead of 3.5 KB andstorage cost of 44 KB, which consumes around 28 mJ for a single authentication round. This result has demonstrated the feasibility in terms of power consumption for the constrained IoT nodes compared with traditional ECC and RSA, where latency is reduced up to 45% while energy efficiency increases by 47%. Security proof under the hardness of Module-LWE is given showing resilience against classical, as well asquantum attacks (replay, impersonation and Sybil). The presented PQ-Lattice architecture is therefore an efficient (in terms of scalability, and energy consumption) quantum-resilient authentication answer tailored to the next generation IoT platform.