Securing the Internet of Things in a Quantum World

Currently, we rely on cryptographic algorithms such as elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECCs) as basic building blocks to secure the communication in the IoT. However, public key schemes like ECC can easily be broken by the upcoming quantum computers. Due to recent advances in quantum computing, we should act now to prepare the IoT for the quantum world. In this article, we focus on the current state of the art and recent developments in the area of quantum-resistant cryptosystems for securing the IoT. We first demonstrate the impacts of quantum computers on the security of the cryptographic schemes used today, and then give an overview of the recommendations for cryptographic schemes that can be secure under the attacks of both classical and quantum computers. After that, we present the existing implementations of quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes on constrained devices suitable for the IoT. Finally, we give an introduction to ongoing projects for quantum-resistant schemes that will help develop future security solutions for the IoT.

[1]  Joppe W. Bos,et al.  Initial recommendations of long-term secure post-quantum systems , 2015 .

[2]  Peter Schwabe,et al.  SPHINCS: Practical Stateless Hash-Based Signatures , 2015, EUROCRYPT.

[3]  Chris Peikert,et al.  A Decade of Lattice Cryptography , 2016, Found. Trends Theor. Comput. Sci..

[4]  Albrecht Petzoldt,et al.  Post-Quantum Cryptography: State of the Art , 2017, The New Codebreakers.

[5]  Carsten Bormann,et al.  Terminology for Constrained-Node Networks , 2014, RFC.

[6]  Tim Güneysu,et al.  High-Performance Ideal Lattice-Based Cryptography on 8-Bit ATxmega Microcontrollers , 2015, LATINCRYPT.

[7]  Johannes A. Buchmann,et al.  XMSS - A Practical Forward Secure Signature Scheme based on Minimal Security Assumptions , 2011, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[8]  Craig Costello,et al.  Post-Quantum Key Exchange for the TLS Protocol from the Ring Learning with Errors Problem , 2015, 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[9]  Luigi Alfredo Grieco,et al.  Security, privacy and trust in Internet of Things: The road ahead , 2015, Comput. Networks.

[10]  T. Monz,et al.  Realization of a scalable Shor algorithm , 2015, Science.

[11]  Stefan Heyse,et al.  Efficient Implementations of MQPKS on Constrained Devices , 2012, CHES.

[12]  Daniel Smith-Tone,et al.  Report on Post-Quantum Cryptography , 2016 .

[13]  Tim Güneysu,et al.  Beyond ECDSA and RSA: Lattice-based digital signatures on constrained devices , 2014, 2014 51st ACM/EDAC/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC).

[14]  Jorge Sá Silva,et al.  Security for the Internet of Things: A Survey of Existing Protocols and Open Research Issues , 2015, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[15]  Chiara Petrioli,et al.  Security as a CoAP resource: An optimized DTLS implementation for the IoT , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC).