Enhanced Network Security Protocols for the Quantum Era: Combining Classical and Post-Quantum Cryptography, and Quantum Key Distribution

The emergence of quantum computing poses a threat to classical cryptography algorithms, necessitating a shift to quantum secure cryptography. Hybrid protocols combining at least one classical and one quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithm are becoming the standard for securing communications. In this work, we present our novel solution for integrating three different cryptographic assumptions (two of them quantum-resistant) into hybrid network security protocols, ensuring that three different cryptographic assumptions must be broken before the protocol becomes vulnerable. Our solution allows for a seamless integration of classical and post-quantum (PQ) cryptography, and quantum key distribution (QKD) into existing network security protocols (e.g., TLS, IPsec) without any major modifications to the protocols themselves. This crypto-agility ensures the mitigation of some of the most well known challenges of both PQ cryptography and QKD. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of such triple-hybrid network security protocols, showing non-substantial decrease in performance and almost no added packet overhead compared to state of the art protocols. In exchange, we pave the way towards next generation networks where the potential of new quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes can be leveraged in a dynamic and agile fashion, thus fostering a new era of unbreakable communication systems.