Post Quantum Secure Command and Control of Mobile Agents Inserting Quantum-Resistant Encryption Schemes in the Secure Robot Operating System

Abstract

The secure command & control (C&C) of mobile agents arises in various settings including unmanned aerial vehicles, single pilot operations in commercial settings, and mobile robots to name a few. As more and more of these applications get integrated into aerospace and defense use cases, the security of the communication channel between the ground station and the mobile agent is of increasing importance. The development of quantum computing devices poses a unique threat to secure communications due to the vulnerability of asymmetric ciphers to Shor’s algorithm. Given the active development of new quantum resistant encryption techniques, we report the first integration of post-quantum secure encryption schemes with robotic operating system (ROS) and C&C of mobile agents, in general. We integrate these schemes in the application and network layers and study the performance of these methods by comparing them to present-day security schemes such as the widely used RSA algorithm.