Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining ground as a pervasive presence around us by enabling miniaturized 'things' with computation and communication capabilities to collect, process, analyze, and interpret information. Consequently, trustworthy data act as fuel for applications that rely on the data generated by these things, for critical decision-making processes, data debugging, risk assessment, forensic analysis, and performance tuning. Currently, secure and reliable data communication in IoT is based on public-key cryptosystems such as the elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC). Nevertheless, the reliance on the security of de-facto cryptographic primitives is at risk of being broken by the impending quantum computers. Therefore, the transition from classical primitives to quantum-safe primitives is indispensable to ensure the overall security of data en route. In this article, we investigate applications of one of the postquantum signatures called hash-based signature (HBS) schemes for the security of IoT devices in the quantum era. We give a succinct overview of the evolution of HBS schemes with an emphasis on their construction parameters and associated strengths and weaknesses. Then, we outline the striking features of HBS schemes and their significance for IoT security in the quantum era. We also investigate the optimal selection of HBS in the IoT networks with respect to their performance-constrained requirements, resource-constrained nature, and design optimization objectives. In addition to ongoing standardization efforts, we also highlight current and future research and deployment challenges along with possible solutions. Finally, we outline the essential measures and recommendations that must be adopted by the IoT ecosystem while preparing for the quantum world.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 9152977 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-17 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | IEEE Internet of Things Journal |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 22 Apr 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Manuscript received April 23, 2020; revised June 27, 2020; accepted July 24, 2020. Date of publication July 30, 2020; date of current version December 21, 2020. This work was supported in part by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT), South Korea, through the Grand Information Technology Research Center Support Program Supervised by the Institute for Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP) under Grant IITP-2020-2015-0-00742, and in part by the IITP Grant Funded by the Korea Government (MSIT) (Development of Neural Processing Unit and Application Systems for Enhancing AI-Based Automobile Communication Technology) under Grant 2020-0-00364. (Corresponding author: Choong Seon Hong.) Sabah Suhail and Choong Seon Hong are with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Yongin 446-701, South Korea (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]).
Funding Information:
The efforts to solicit and evaluate quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms for an inevitable transition to postquantum cryptography (PQC) are underway by many standardization organizations. For instance, the National Security Agency (NSA) plans to shift from the Suite B set of cryptographic algorithms toward PQC [60]. Furthermore, workshops and calls for proposals are initiated by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [61] in the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization project (evaluation of Round 2 candidate algorithms in the process [62]) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) [63] in quantum-safe cryptography (QSC) [64] project to indicate the increasing necessity of switching to PQC. Regarding the specification of HBS, the Internet engineering task force (IETF) is targeting both XMSS and LMS for standardization [65], [66]. Other ongoing projects and developments to promote research on postquantum cryptosystems by European Commission include PQCRYPTO [67] (conducting research on PQC for small devices, the Internet, and the cloud) and SAFEcrypto [68] (focuses on secure postquantum cryptographic solutions to preserve the privacy of government data and protection of data in communication systems) [7]. Similarly, the CryptoMathCREST [69] research project is supported by the Japan Science and Technology Agency to study the mathematical problems underlying the security of PQC.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 IEEE.
Keywords
- Blockchain
- distributed ledger technology (DLT)
- hash-based signature (HBS)
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Internet-of-Things (IoT) security
- postquantum cryptography (PQC)
- public-key cryptography
- quantum computing