Lightweight Post-Quantum Secure Communication Protocol for IoT Devices Using Code-Based Cryptography

As the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes more active, a large amount of information, including personal data, is being transmitted through IoT devices. To protect this information, it is important for devices to communicate using mutual encryption. Due to the performance limitations inherent in IoT devices, lightweight security protocols are required. Currently, most cryptographic techniques used in security protocols are based on RSA and ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography). However, if high-performance quantum computers are developed and Shor’s algorithm is utilized, the foundational security assumptions of RSA and ECC can be easily broken, rendering them unusable. Therefore, this paper proposes a security protocol that is resilient to the computational capabilities of quantum computers. It employs ROLLO, a code-based cryptographic algorithm that is currently under consideration in the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) post-quantum cryptography standardization competition. Additionally, to facilitate mutual communication between IoT devices, computationally efficient operations such as hashing and XOR are utilized. Finally, the proposed protocol is compared and analyzed in terms of performance and security against existing protocols.