Performance Evaluation of Quantum Secure User Plane Traffic in Beyond 5G Systems

3GPP is currently considering the introduction of the 256-bit variant of symmetric-key cryptographic algorithms for beyond 5G Advanced systems, in addition to the 128-bit algorithms to attain higher security strength. In the recent years, a new security scheme called, Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) has been gaining popularity, and claims to be fast enough to provide confidentiality and integrity protection together with reduced instruction cycles. It is of interest, to consider such efficient algorithms for user plane protection in 5G and beyond, to maintain stringent performance metrics without compromising on security in a post quantum era. In this paper, we provide state-of-the-art performance evaluation on a test bed and propose the usage of AEAD scheme implemented using AES-GCM (AES-Galois Counter Mode) operation in 5G Systems for achieving higher security strength of quantum-resistant communications. We further extended our exploration to assess the performance impact of integrating AEAD with the quantum resistant variants of protocols PQ-TLS, IKEv2 with PPKs for an end-to-end user plane security. We performed a comparative analysis of the 256-bit variant of AES-GCM mode of operation with traditional AES modes of operation in 128-bit and 256-bit variants, by considering performance metrics such as throughput, energy consumption, CPU utilization and latency. We have observed that, AES-256 GCM provides an increase in throughput by 9.4% when both ciphering and integrity protection are applied. Similarly, we observed a reduction of 200% in latency for AES-256 GCM than that of AES-128 modes of operations. We also ran experiments on energy utilization and CPU utilization and observed that AES-256 GCM consumes 16% more energy and CPU cycles utilization is more than AES-256 CTR. From the evaluation results, we observed that the transition to 256-bit crypto algorithms is needed not only for realizing a quantum secure system, but also to increase the system performance.