Post-Quantum Public Key Cryptography for the Internet of Things

Abstract: Recent progress in the field of quantum computers provide radically improved muscles to search and sort in lists, solve systems of equations and prime factorize – virtues that inflict an immediate threat to the most common systems for public key cryptography used in a vast proportion of today’s computer networks. NTRUEncrypt is a lattice-based cryptography system which inhibits quantum computers for breaking the algorithm in polynomial time. The cryptographic algorithm is one of the seventeen that passed the first round in the NIST Post-Quantum standardisation competition which serves an indication that this system is robust against the efforts from a cryptanalysist to compromise its security properties. With the development of a server and client application that is built using Python3 integrated with WolfSSL, the results obtained from the experiment show that the suggested model acquires the capabilities to overcome the quantum computers capacities, providing fast quantum-safe asymmetric encryption algorithm for TLS communication in smart homes. The handshake process with NTRUEncrypt and WolfSSL is proven to be significantly faster comparing to other algorithms tested.