A Distributed and Collaborative NTRU-Based Cryptographic Scheme for Edge-IoT Architecture

Many post-quantum cryptographic schemes have been proposed in the literature, offering resistance to attacks launched by quantum computers. Due to its promising security properties, NTRU was selected as a candidate in the final round of the NIST competition on post-quantum cryptography. However, this method poses challenges for constrained devices due to its high computation and memory requirements. Motivated by the need to extend the lifetime of resource-constrained IoT devices while still being able to withstand a quantum attacker, in this chapter we propose a new NTRU-based collaborative encryption scheme for such devices. Our scheme preserves the confidentiality of sensitive information exchanged among constrained IoT devices deployed in an edge computing architecture. Our approach distributes the workload of the cryptographic operations among the edge nodes and IoT devices within the same network. This collaborative approach enables IoT devices to significantly reduce their computational cost while maintaining data confidentiality. Additionally, the proposed distribution of computing allows scalability and a better sustainability of IoT environments. Finally, we demonstrate through empirical evaluation and extensive simulation that our scheme is secure, improves energy saving and resource utilization in IoT networks, and is more efficient than the traditional centralized approach.