Quantum computing challenges the computational hardness assumptions anchoring the security of public-key ciphers, such as the prime factorization and the discrete logarithm problem. To prepare for the quantum era and withstand the attacks equipped with quantum computing, the security and cryptography communities are designing new quantum-resistant public-key ciphers. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is collecting and standardizing the post-quantum ciphers, similarly to its past involvements in establishing DES and AES as symmetric cipher standards. The NIST finalist algorithms for public-key signatures are Dilithium, Falcon, and Rainbow. Finding common ground to compare these algorithms can be difficult because of their design, the underlying computational hardness assumptions (lattice based vs. multivariate based), and the different metrics used for security strength analyses in the previous research (qubits vs. quantum gates). We overcome such challenges and compare the security and the performances of the finalist post-quantum ciphers of Dilithium, Falcon, and Rainbow. For security comparison analyses, we advance the prior literature by using the depth-width cost for quantum circuits (DW cost) to measure the security strengths and by analyzing the security in Universal Quantum Gate Model and with Quantum Annealing. For performance analyses, we compare the algorithms’ computational loads in the execution time as well as the communication costs and implementation overheads when integrated with Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP). Our work presents a security comparison and performance analysis as well as the trade-off analysis to inform the post-quantum cipher design and standardization to protect computing and networking in the post-quantum era.
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This content will become publicly available on June 9, 2025
Securing Post-Quantum DNSSEC Against Fragmentation Mis-Association Threat
Domain Name System Security Extensions
(DNSSEC) uses public-key digital signatures to provide
integrity and authentication for DNS query responses. The
current standardized DNS for reliable UDP delivery limits DNS
response (including the message, signature, and public key) to
a maximum of 1232 bytes. Incorporating NIST’s post-quantum
digital signatures into the DNS protocol results in a response size
that exceeds the limit set by the Ethernet standardization, making
PQC incompatible with the current standardized DNS. To address
the incompatibility and enable PQC to protect the authenticity
against the quantum-equipped adversaries, previous research
proposed fragmenting the DNSSEC messages. Fragmentation
however exposes DNSSEC to Fragmentation Mis-Association
threat, traditionally studied in the broader IP fragmentation
contexts and not applicable in the current DNSSEC with
classical/pre-quantum cipher (no fragmentation needed). We
distinguish our work from the previous research incorporating
PQC to DNSSEC to defend against the Fragmentation Mis-
Association Threat by chaining the fragments and applying
cryptographic commit-and-reveal. We also advance the previous
research and further reduce the number of packet fragments,
which can be particularly useful as the DNSSEC based on UDP
is prone to packet transmission failure increasing the chance of
the DNS response failure when sent in multiple fragments, by
using blockchain to offload and enable the offline delivery of the
public key. Our scheme thus even allows the Falcon-512 PQC
cipher incorporation to forgo the fragmentation, in contrast to
the previous research requiring fragmentation for Falcon-512;
the other PQC ciphers, i.e., Dilithium ciphers and Falcon-1024,
still require fragmentation in our scheme due to the standardized
signature sizes. We implement our scheme and analyze the
effectiveness and performances through experimentation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1922410
- PAR ID:
- 10509866
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Communications
- ISSN:
- 2641-0818
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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