Post-Quantum Enabled Cyber Physical Systems

Abstract

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) will be deployed for decades, thus they should be secure against long-term attacks. Most CPSs adopt the datagram transport layer security (DTLS), as the de facto security protocol. By using public key cryptography (PKC) based on traditional RSA or elliptic-curves, DTLS establishes secured communication channels between multiple parties. However, the foreseeable breakthrough of quantum computers represents a risk for many PKC ecosystems. Traditional PKC will no be longer considered secure. Therefore, the integration of post-quantum security is mandatory. Due to their limited resources, tight performance requirements, and long-term life-cycles, this is especially challenging for CPSs. In this letter we propose, implement and evaluate for the first time a post-quantum enhanced DTLS, able to establish secure communications of CPSs, even in the presence of quantum computers. An NTRU post-quantum solution was used to perform the key transport among the CPSs entities. We show that is feasible to integrate our post-quantum enhanced DTLS, together with the full Internet engineering task force protocol stack in highly constrained environments, such as the CPSs.