A Selection Technique for Effective Utilization of Post-Quantum Cryptography in 5G Application and Beyond

Abstract

In the quantum computing era, classical cryptography algorithms are expected to be unsafe. To provide a solution to the problem that may occur to this effect, Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms are being considered as replacements to classical algorithms. It is essential to consider the effect of using PQC algorithms on applications and services as many applications come with strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, especially in 5G and beyond 5G applications. Therefore, this paper proposes a technique for selecting a suitable PQC algorithm to achieve an effective utilization of PQC algorithms in applications/protocols. In this study, a rule-based selection technique is adopted. In particular, a PQC selection rule is generated based on an application/protocol traffic pattern/characteristics and the security requirements such as key/signature size, the strength of the PQC algorithm, time taken to share secret keys and so on. Thereafter, the process of selecting a PQC algorithm is presented. To select a suitable PQC algorithm, the use case in which an application traffic belongs is identified, and based on the traffic flow tag, a selection rule is applied. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by experimenting with the PQC algorithms using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) handshake. The evaluation results show that the proposed PQC selection method is useful in selecting a suitable algorithm based on real application traffic and the QoS requirements.