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To provide safe communication across an unprotected medium such as the internet, network protocols are being established. These protocols employ public key techniques to perform key exchange and authentication. Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a widely used network protocol that enables secure communication between a server and a client. TLS is employed in billions of transactions per second. Contemporary protocols depend on traditional methods that utilize the computational complexity of factorization or (elliptic curve) logarithm mathematics problems. The ongoing advancement in the processing power of classical computers requires an ongoing increase in the security level of the underlying cryptographic algorithms. This study focuses on the analysis of Curve448 and Edwards curve Ed448, renowned for their superior security features that offer a 224-bit level of security as part of the TLSv1.3 protocol. The exponential advancement of quantum computers, however, presents a substantial threat to secure network communication that depends on classical crypto schemes, irrespective of their degree of security. Quantum computers have the capability to resolve these challenges within a feasible timeframe. In order to successfully transition to Post-Quantum secure network protocols, it is imperative to concurrently deploy both classical and post-quantum algorithms. This is done to fulfill the requirements of both enterprises and governments, while also instilling more assurance in the reliability of the post-quantum systems. This paper presents a detailed hybrid implementation architecture of the TLSv1.3 network protocol. We showcase the first deployment of Curve448 and Crystals-Kyber for the purpose of key exchanging, and Ed448 and Crystals-Dilithium for verifying the authenticity of entities and for X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). We rely upon the widely used OpenSSL library and the specific wolfSSL library for embedded devices to provide our results for server and client applications.
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This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
A Quantum Good Authentication Protocol
This article presents a novel network protocol that incorporates a quantum photonic channel for symmetric key distribution, a Dilithium signature to replace factor-based public key cryptography for enhanced authentication, security, and privacy. The protocol uses strong hash functions to hash original messages and verify heightened data integrity at the destination. This Quantum good authentication protocol (QGP) provides high-level security provided by the theory of quantum mechanics. QGP also has the advantage of quantum-resistant data protection that prevents current digital computer and future quantum computer attacks. QGP transforms the transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) by adding a quantum layer at the bottom of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model (layer 0) and modifying the top layer (layer 7) with Dilithium signatures, thus improving the security of the original OSI model. In addition, QGP incorporates strong encryption, hardware-based quantum channels, post-quantum signatures, and secure hash algorithms over a platform of decryptors, switches, routers, and network controllers to form a testbed of the next-generation, secure quantum internet. The experiments presented here show that QGP provides secure authentication and improved security and privacy and can be adopted as a new protocol for the next-generation quantum internet.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2329053
- PAR ID:
- 10634669
- Publisher / Repository:
- CSIAC
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CSIAC journal
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2836-7391
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 11-21
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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