Nested Hash Access With Post Quantum Encryption for Mission-Critical IoT Communications

Abstract

Secure ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) has become a crucial requirement of mission-critical Internet of Things (IoT) applications and use cases including automotive driving, remote surgery, and many others. However, it is still challenging to protect initial access of massive IoT devices over wireless channels, especially when malicious quantum adversaries paralyse the initial access by overhearing and tampering critical wireless messages, i.e., preambles. We propose a nested hash access system with post-quantum encryption to solve this issue. The system performs random repetition coding and nested hash coding on multi-domain physical-layer resources to encode and decode preambles precisely and resiliently. Particularly, a subtle compression and encryption mechanism based on quasi-cyclic (QC)-moderate-density parity-check (MDPC) code is proposed between repetition and hashing operations to avoid passive eavesdropping during preamble encoding process. We show that the code information can be maintained at 128-bit or higher privacy level, depending on the length of repetition code. Besides, the preamble decoding process can be proved secure agaisnt active attacks with a tolerable loss of decoding errors. Then we formulate two non-convex integer programming problems, each problem corresponding to the minimization of upper bound of preamble decoding error in an example application scenario. Finally, we can derive the expressions of system failure probability to evaluate the reliability of URLLC system under mission-critical IoT scenarios. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme despite attack.