Title: Quantum-safe authentication mechanism for IoT devices using hash-based post-quantum signature schemes: a short review

Authors: Purvi Tandel; Jitendra Nasriwala

Addresses: Department of Information Technology and Cyber Security, Chhotubhai Gopalbhai Patel Institute of Technology, Uka Tarsadia University, Surat, Gujarat, India ' Babu Madhav Institute of Information Technology, Uka Tarsadia University, Surat, Gujarat, India

Abstract: We are surrounded by many smart applications that make human life efficient. The general concept of IoT applications involves communication between devices. To make our smart environment secure, authentication is the most important requirement to be achieved to avoid unwanted attacks. Cryptographic schemes used currently in such IoT devices are public-key cryptographic primitives that are vulnerable to future quantum attacks. Quantum approaches derived by Shor and Grover will break the public-key primitives with square root and cube root speedups. Hence, there is a need to develop a successful and efficient signature scheme to authenticate such devices. Post-quantum cryptographic approaches are based on hard mathematical problems which are difficult to break by future attacks. Amongst all these post-quantum signature approaches, hash-based post-quantum signatures incorporate existing hash algorithms to achieve the required security level. This paper summarises stateful hash-based post-quantum signature schemes that can be implemented on constrained devices for IoT applications.

Keywords: authentication mechanism; constrained devices; digital signature; hash-based cryptography; IoT applications; post-quantum cryptography; signature scheme; stateful signature scheme.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGUC.2025.146284

International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing, 2025 Vol.16 No.3, pp.247 - 258

Received: 17 Aug 2023
Accepted: 14 Mar 2024
Published online: 15 May 2025 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article