A Post-Quantum Cryptographic Framework for Secure and Resilient IoT Communication
Keywords:
Post-quantum cryptography; Internet of Things security; module learning with errors; key encapsulation mechanism; lightweight cryptography; crypto-agility; hash-based signatures; quantum-resilient communication.Abstract
The impending emergence of cryptographically relevant quantum computers poses an existential threat to the elliptic-curve and RSA-based key-exchange protocols that currently secure the vast majority of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. Constrained IoT devices are especially exposed to “harvest-now, decrypt-later” adversaries because their long deployment lifetimes routinely exceed the anticipated timeline for quantum cryptanalytic capability. This paper proposes PQ-IoTShield, a post-quantum cryptographic framework purpose-built for resource-constrained IoT communication. The framework combines a lightweight Module Learning-With-Errors (Module-LWE) key encapsulation mechanism with a compact hash-based digital signature scheme inside a crypto-agility controller that dynamically selects among NIST security categories L1, L3, and L5 according to a device's live compute, memory, energy, and bandwidth budget. An adaptive session resilience layer performs loss-aware retransmission and partial-key reconciliation to sustain secure session establishment over lossy low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) links. The framework was implemented on ESP32 and ARM Cortex-M4 (STM32L4) reference platforms and evaluated against RSA-2048, ECDH (secp256r1), NTRU-HPS, and standalone Kyber-512/Dilithium2 baselines using an NS-3-based lossy-link emulation testbed. PQ-IoTShield reduced mean handshake latency by 23.6% to 90.5% relative to the evaluated baselines, lowered per-handshake energy consumption to 4.6 mJ, and sustained a 79.7% successful session-establishment rate at 30% simulated packet loss compared with 33.1% for standalone Kyber-512. Ablation experiments confirm that the crypto-agility controller and the resilience layer each provide statistically significant, non-redundant contributions to overall performance. These results indicate that PQ-IoTShield is a practical, deployable pathway toward quantum-resilient IoT communication.
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