Recent Advances in Post-Quantum Cryptography for Networks: A Survey

Abstract

The development of quantum computers poses a new security threat to network infrastructures and services, as they will be powerful enough to break the most common forms of digital encryption. Existing encryption services based on Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), Diffie-Hellman (DH), Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and so on are vulnerable to attacks by quantum computers. Although the gap between today's quantum computers and the threats they pose to current public-key cryptography is large, the telecommunications landscape should begin planning for the transition to the post-quantum era as early as possible. In this paper, we examine recent advances in Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms from the perspective of the networking and telecommunications industries. The efforts are categorized at three levels, namely communication, computation (consisting of design, implementation and Public Key System (PKS)), and network. Some of the existing challenges and future recommendations for securing communication networks in the post-quantum era are also listed at the end of the paper.

Entropy service for secure real‐time mission critical communications

“…Modern stream ciphers do not have these types of vulnerabilities. In addition, post-quantum cryptography 44 can increase immunity to these attacks.…”

“…However, their existence in the network domain are still under investigation and there are many challenges to overcome. 44,45 Finally, Table 3 summarizes the comparisons in terms of limitations, benefits and characteristics of each of the key change strategies discussed above, namely Key Refreshing, Hash Functions, Key Hierarchy and the proposed Entropy Service methods discussed in this paper.…”

“…Modern stream ciphers do not have these types of vulnerabilities. In addition, post‐quantum cryptography 44 can increase immunity to these attacks. Side‐channel attacks aim to obtain physical information (eg, timing, power consumption, and electrical leaks in circuit). These attacks can infer data from GC in a temporal manner and can cause disruption (eg, latency and jitter) to a time‐limited MC service in a shared infrastructure.…”

“…Therefore, advances in quantum computing have accelerated the early adoption and testing of post quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms. However, their existence in the network domain are still under investigation and there are many challenges to overcome 44,45 …”

Post-Quantum Blockchain-Based Secure Service Orchestration in Multi-Cloud Networks

“…Quantum computers are capable of solving problems such as the discrete logarithm, which makes cryptographic algorithms such as Diffie-Hellman key exchange, the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) insecure. Shor's algorithm already provides significant improvements in factorization of large numbers, opening vulnerabilities for quantum computing, while Grover's algorithm can speed up the generation of hashes, making the linking of blocks by hashing less secure [8], [9].…”