Hybrid Hardware-Software Architecture for Quantum Secure IoT Embedded Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) communication prevents information from being decrypted or tampered with by unauthorized third parties. Post-quantum cryptography ensures that the information exchange between IoT devices can resist potential quantum computer attacks, thereby enhancing the quantum security of the IoT. This paper presents a quantum-secure hardware-software architecture for embedded systems. An FPGA-based post-quantum cryptographic Kyber accelerator and an STM32 microcontroller with AES encryption are integrated into the system. Customized hardware structures such as hash and modular arithmetic unit provide faster calculation speed. The command exchange protocol bridges embedded software and FPGA hardware. The server handles key generation and decryption, while the client manages encryption. AES-256 encryption is utilized to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the data and keys, with the Kyber algorithm encrypting the session keys. Compared to previous works, this implementation demonstrates better resource utilization as well as enhanced performance in key generation, encryption, and decryption. Hardware implementation operates at 100MHz on the Artix-7 FPGA platform, consuming 20,782 LUTs, 5,077 FFs, 7.5 BRAMs, and 8 DSPs. The architecture also achieves up to 1.5× speed improvements in encryption and similar enhancements in decryption across various security levels.