Measuring the impact of post quantum cryptography in Industrial IoT scenarios

The continuously evolving nature of cryptography is driven by the emergence of new threats and attack vectors. Quantum computers pose a paradigmatic security risk to cryptography, challenging its very core principles. This quantum threat can be appropriately addressed through quantum-safe cryptographic primitives, such as quantum key distribution and post-quantum cryptography (PQC). In the case of PQC, the paradigm shift involves using algorithms with significantly higher computational costs. This paper analyzes the possibilities and challenges of transitioning from current cryptographic systems to PQC alternatives, with a focus on the critical case of constrained-resource devices. We demonstrate the feasibility of such a transition in IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) scenarios with limited nodes, and we evaluate how new proposals can mitigate the impact of signature computations on securing IoT/IIoT devices. In this work, we design and implement a novel framework to conduct an extensive set of experiments measuring the performance of different families of PQC algorithms in terms of execution time and power consumption. Both the framework and the dataset have been published in the EU Open Research Repository Zenodo to facilitate the future selection of algorithms that best adapt to the specific characteristics of each system.