Assessment of the Impact of Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography on the Performance of the MQTT Communication Protocol
Felipe José Aguiar Rampazzo, Marco Aurélio Amaral Henriques · 2023
The use of the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) communication protocol in the Industry 4.0 faces the challenge of data protection. The security layer provided by Transport Layer Security (TLS) is threatened by the emergence of quantum computers, accelerating the need for MQTT to sup-port post-quantum algorithms. This work evaluates secure imple-mentations of MQTT with pre-quantum cryptography algorithms (those used nowadays) and with hybrid algorithms, combining pre and post-quantum techniques. In both cases, the system performance is assessed in terms of memory consumption and CPU cycles, identifying the main challenges for the deployment of hybrid cryptography in an industrial Internet of Things context.